Former RNC chair says deporting illegal immigrant is just like Middle East insurgents kidnapping Americans

Former RNC Chair and MSNBC analyst Michael Steele compared the U.S. government deporting an illegal immigrant to El Salvador to despotic regimes kidnapping Americans or journalists while abroad on Tuesday. 

During an MSNBC segment, Steele argued that the U.S. deporting illegal immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia from Maryland to the "Terrorism Confinement Center" in El Salvador earlier this year is similar to radical Islamic terrorists capturing Americans in the Middle East, or Russian President Vladimir Putin kidnapping journalists.

"How is this different from when Putin grabs a journalist or some, you know, rogue group in the Middle East grabs an American, and we're sitting here fighting to try to get them back," he asked.

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"Our own government did this," he continued. "Our own government snatched him up and put him in harm's way and now refuses to do what it must do and should do to get him back home."

Steele made the comments to Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., who recently traveled to meet with the deported immigrant but was denied access to the prisoner by local government officials. 

Ivey agreed with the former RNC chair's assessment that the U.S. is acting like Putin or Islamic extremist groups, prompting Steele to double down.

"We're doing the exact same thing here in the U.S. now, with our own government. We're petitioning our government to stop seizing people and grabbing them off the street and putting them in foreign prisons." 

"Yeah," Ivey replied.

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Steele is the latest pundit to engage in the debate over Abrego Garcia between the Democratic Party and Republicans. Democratic figures, like Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., have claimed that Abrego Garcia has been unjustly deported to the mega prison.

Van Hollen previously said that it was "absolutely unjust and illegal to have this Marylander detained one more day in a notorious prison in El Salvador." He also traveled to the country to meet with Abrego Garcia, a meeting that was heavily criticized by the Trump administration.

Though some government officials acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia's deportation to the Central American country was an administrative error, high-level Trump administration officials say the illegal immigrant was correctly removed and that he's a member of the MS-13 gang.

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Mentioning the detained migrant's 2022 arrest, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Press Secretary Tricia McLaughlin recently declared, "Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member, illegal alien from El Salvador, and suspected human trafficker. The facts reveal he was pulled over with eight individuals in a car on an admitted three-day journey from Texas to Maryland with no luggage."

She continued, "The facts speak for themselves, and they reek of human trafficking. The media's sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal gang member has completely fallen apart. We hear far too much about the gang members and criminals' false sob stories and not enough about their victims."

Both a federal district court and the U.S. Supreme Court have ordered the Trump administration to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's release and return to the U.S. for proper deportation proceedings.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said that Abrego Garcia would not be allowed back into the U.S. unless El Salvador were to decide otherwise. 

"He is not coming back to our country," she said.

In response to Steele's claims, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Fox News Digital, "Michael Steele is suffering from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and should apologize to all the innocent people he just insulted by comparing them to a terrorist illegal immigrant, human-trafficker, and wife-beater who had no legal right to be in the United States."