A pair of Fox News co-hosts got into a heated argument over the case of a Maryland dad deported in what the Trump administration admitted was an “administrative error.”
Jessica Tarlov, The Five’s resident liberal, clashed with Trump acolyte Jeanine Pirro after Pirro offered an impassioned defense of the president’s deportation policy, using Maryland woman Rachel Morin—a hiker killed in 2023 by a fugitive from El Salvador—as an example.
Pirro specifically defended the Trump administration for deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national living in Maryland. Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally in 2011, though a judge later determined that he shouldn’t be deported to his homeland because he could be persecuted there; he was nevertheless detained and deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison last month anyway.
Pirro raged that Democrats don’t care about the victims of crime perpetrated by illegal immigrants and added: “Biden! And that’s the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. Start caring about American citizens!”
Tarlov countered by focusing on the fact that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, an error admitted by multiple Trump administration officials. Others, including Trump himself, have accused Abrego Garcia of being part of the MS-13 gang, but he has never been convicted or even charged with being a member of the organization, which has recently been designated a terrorist group.
“First and foremost, Abrego Garcia, there is no proof that he was an MS-13 member,” Tarlov said. “It has been debunked many times.”
“It’s been debunked by liberal newspapers!” Pirro shot back.
“That’s not true! Stop!” Tarlov demanded, in the face of Pirro’s agitated cries.
“Section I-113 or 123 is reliable, verifiable proof you were a member of the gang, and he was never able to rebut it,” Pirro said.
Tarlov referenced the fact that the allegation that Garcia was an MS-13 member was based on “double hearsay testimony and also a detective who was indicted merely weeks later for providing confidential information to a sex worker.”
Despite this, and the fact that in multiple filings the government has conceded that it wrongfully removed him from the U.S., Pirro and other Trump cheerleaders are trying to defend his deportation, using his apparent danger to the country as a primary excuse.
Tarlov attempted to cut through the noise, saying: “He’s an on-the-books worker. This is not somebody who is a gang banger.”
She added: “This is not someone who has committed any other crime besides being here in this country. And he came here also based on a credible threat of being murdered by a gang at home who was threatening his entire family.
“The reason that Democrats are talking about the fact that anyone could quote-unquote be disappeared is that you can see a full-blown constitutional crisis playing out in front of our eyes.”
Tarlov continued by saying that under the Alien Enemies Act that Trump invoked to kick off his purge of immigrants, “you deserve due process.”
“And it is not the same thing to deport someone to their home country as to send them to a prison. You know that!” Tarlov concluded.
Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen will travel to El Salvador on Wednesday to get an update on his constituent’s well-being.
He, too, referenced a potential “constitutional crisis.”
Ahead of his trip to El Salvador, he told the Guardian in the United Kingdom: “We were in the gray zone before this. But if the Trump administration continues to thumb its nose at the federal courts in this case we’re in, we’re clearly in constitutional crisis territory.”
