On July 10, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had deported Tou Lue Vang. Vang arrived in America illegally as a child and later became a legal permanent resident. In 2006, he was convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for long-running abuse of a ten-year-old girl. He lost his status and was ordered removed, yet remained in the United States for another twenty years under federal supervision. Late in 2025, he was arrested by ICE; a judge ordered his release while his immigration case worked its way through the courts. In June, Gov. Tim Walz and the Minnesota Board of Pardons pardoned Vang, with a seeming eye to keeping him in the country. The Trump administration deported him anyway, prompting a protest from Walz: “Did that make us any safer? Did that make the children that are left behind any more stable? Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”
The resolution of the Vang case is likely—despite what may be regarded as an unduly long grace period—to please advocates of a more secure border. But the case bears striking parallels to another one that is still in administrative and legal limbo, and much better known: that of Kilmar Abrego García.
On June 22, the Department of Justice filed notice it would appeal a Tennessee judge’s dismissal of human trafficking charges against García. It was the latest phase in the Salvadoran national’s public battle to avoid deportation. Abrego, who entered the country illegally as a teen, first came to the attention of immigration authorities in 2019 after an arrest for loitering and marijuana possession in Maryland. He spent seven months in ICE custody. Before his release, he was denied asylum but granted a withholding of removal order to El Salvador on the grounds that he feared persecution by the country’s violent gangs. Abrego was arrested again in 2022 by Tennessee state police, and then in 2025, this time by ICE, and slated for deportation. It was after his deportation in March 2025 to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo that Abrego became a cause celebre for pundits and politicians, culminating in the public visit paid to him by Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.).
Abrego is not a citizen of the United States and is therefore ineligible to vote; in the eyes of some, Van Hollen was at risk of appearing to care more about non-citizens than his own constituents. Recall that he did not go nearly as far out of his way for the Maryland family of Rachel Morin, who was murdered by an illegal immigrant in 2023. Gavin Newsom said of the Abrego case: “This is the debate they want. This is their 80-20 issue.” Newsom’s comments drew pushback from many progressives, but he was onto something. A string of court cases and administrative decisions have not only accorded non-citizens equal rights with Americans, they have in some cases offered them better treatment—even creating a two-tier system in which US citizens are at a disadvantage.
Consider the emergency Vang pardon, or the 2018 finding from New York State’s highest court that illegal immigrants facing deportation are entitled to jury trials in cases of misdemeanors for which citizens may simply get a bench trial. In Tennessee last year, the Chinese national Yisong Huang was responsible for a truck crash that killed one person and injured others. Post-crash, Huang failed the English proficiency test normally required for obtaining a Commercial Driver’s License; it seems that this test was either waived or ignored, since Huang had managed to obtain his license anyway thanks to work papers issued by the Biden administration. In a similar case in New York, an illegal immigrant had been issued a CDL with “No Name Given” entered into the first-name slot. The Biden administration permitted illegal immigrants to use arrest warrants as valid ID to board commercial flights, even as ID requirements have been made more stringent for legal residents.
Fairfax County District Attorney Steve Descano seemed to make the privileges accorded to non-citizens explicit when he pledged to instruct his office to make charging and plea decisions that “limit or avoid immigration consequences.” In other words, illegal immigrants would potentially face less serious charges than citizens accused of the same crimes. (Descano scrubbed this pledge from his website in the wake of a murder committed in his jurisdiction by an illegal immigrant.)
“A philosophical stance underlies this view.”
A philosophical stance underlies this view. In recent decades, the truism that America is a “nation of immigrants” has birthed a stronger corollary claim: that any effort to restrict and deter immigration strikes so deeply at America’s core being that all forms of radical resistance, up to and including violence in the streets, are an appropriate response.
One of the arguments offered in favor of this vision holds that an endless flow of cheap, low-skill labor largely unprotected by law or regulation is an essential underpinning of our prosperity. Living in uneasy tandem with this call for an endless supply of gray- and black-market workers is the idea that encouraging immigration inflows is a moral duty.
Trump’s opposition to this outlook has brought him into conflict with the bipartisan US political establishment in a way no other position or policy has. More than his economic protectionism, more even than his insistence on voter verification, it has engendered enduring and explosive political opposition at the state and municipal level, a campaign of some legitimate protest and more naked street terror (the latter often winked at or even enabled by municipal powers that be), and a sweeping legal and judicial campaign to “resist” Trump.
Standing behind this opposition to Trump’s nationalism is an imperial view of America’s place in the world. This outlook was articulated by Michelle Wu, the Boston mayor and progressive leader. “Every person, every single human being, has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum or shelter, and those policies have been in place for a long time,” Wu said in March.
In the most superficial sense this is correct: Anyone can apply; indeed, the admission criteria have grown more and more permissive over the past thirty years. Yet Wu, like other progressive mayors, has also worked to create a zone of exception to Trump’s hardened national border in her city, via laws that prevent local law enforcement from co-operating with federal law enforcement on civil deportations. This gives her rhetoric about asylum a striking new color. She seems to be suggesting that every non-US citizen currently alive is potentially American, and treating them in the best terms is the truest route to spreading what Thomas Jefferson called the “empire of liberty.”
Forget manifest destiny; forget “The Gift Outright”; forget the Pax Americana (whose name at least acknowledges the imperium its architects sought to grasp). No grander, more expansive vision of the global American empire exists than the one enunciated—no doubt unintentionally—by Wu, van Hollen, and their allies. This vision dissolves all other nationhoods, all ties of land or blood, and encompasses everyone, everywhere, all at once. The only missing element was supplied by Abrego himself as he prepared to enter federal custody last summer: “God is with us, and God will never leave us. God will bring justice to us.”