Deported? What’s in a Name?

Rachel Ida Buff

17 April 2025:U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen was told it was impossible to meet with Kilmar Ábrego Garcia after he had been deported to a maxi-prison in El Salvador, but Ábrego Garcia’s family and network publicized his case.

You won’t have your names when
 you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be
 deportees.
—Woody Guthrie
“Plane Wreck at Los Gatos,” 1948

SINCE HIS WRONGFUL kidnapping by the Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) in March, the world has had on its lips the name of Salvadoran American Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia.

Knowing his name facilitates our collective identification with his story. It flies in the face of government attempts to dehumanize migrants by stripping them of their possessions, dressing them identically, and hustling them onto deportation flights.

The name Kilmar Ábrego Garcia is mentioned widely as evidence of just how far the current federal deportation terror has gone off the legal rails. At protests around the world, people chant it, like a prayer for the release of all unjustly detained.

This repetition and the insistence on his freedom has likely resulted in his return to the United States, despite the insistence of autocrats in both El Salvador and the U.S. that this “could never happen.”

Having his name in mind makes it easier to imagine Ábrego Garcia’s life as a worker and family man in Maryland as well as the terror of his abduction and incarceration in Salvadoran prisons now funded by U.S. tax dollars.

Aware of the stakes, immigrant rights organizers have worked hard to make Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia visible. Ábrego Garcia and his family are members of CASA, a worker and immigrant-led organization with roots in the struggle against U.S. intervention in Central America during the 1970s and 1980s, The organization provides legal support for Garcia’s case as well as holding vigils and rallies and working with his family to keep his case in the public eye.

CASA org­anizers are re­sponsible for the mass media circulation of the Ábrego Garcia’s name and the tale of his abduction.

His story, along with those of other high-profile detainees like Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Madawi, and Badar Khan Suri, has come to symbolize the struggle against the Trump regime and its terrorizing, detaining and deporting of non-citizens, despite their established constitutional rights to due process.

Combating this regime, organizers illuminate the humanity of those unjustly taken from their lives and communities. In the cases of Madawi, Öztürk and Suri, campaigns for visibility have helped to secure their release from detention. At this writing, his ongoing, illegal detention under a cruel misreading of the McCarthyist McCarran Walter Act (1952) has already compelled Khalil to miss the birth of his first child.

The current administration deploys a false language of “invasion” to enact laws like the Alien Enemies Act, intended for use only in wartime. Caravans of people wearing out their shoes and risking their lives on desperate journeys to find safe harbor for themselves and their families in no way constitute a military invasion. But broadcasting such threats bolsters the current regime’s quest for totalitarian control over immigrants as well as citizens.

Dehumanizing language like “criminal alien,” “bad hombre” and “wetback” transforms a group of people with complex stories and deep roots in their communities into a threatening enemy, to be dispatched with increasingly militarized force. If no one knows another story, such dirty tricks can prevail.

Lighting up the names and stories of those targeted for deportation to counter xenophobic public policy has long been a central strategy of immigrant rights advocates. Throughout the 20th century and into the present, immigrant rights advocates have worked to counter the dehumanizing language of mass deportation.

The William Heikkila Story

In 1958, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the predecessor to ICE, kidnapped Finnish American draftsman William Heikkila on his walk home from work in San Francisco.

INS Commissioner Joseph May Swing had declared Heikkila Public Enemy Number One, because his background included organizing in northern Minnesota for farmers’ and workers’ rights during the Great Depression as well as ongoing participation in California’s Finnish American left.

Presaging the “extraordinary renditions” of the War on Terror, the INS jailed Heikkila without trial and then quickly put him on a plane to Helsinki.

Wedged between and INS agent and a Finnish lumberjack headed home for a visit, Heikkila chatted with the lumberjack in Finnish. When the plane made an unscheduled landing in Nova Scotia for repairs, all the passengers except Heikkila were allowed to disembark. In the small airport, the lumberjack called Heikkila’s wife Phyllis, who then contacted the press.

The media ran with Heikkila’s story, broadcasting his kidnapping and the fact that Phyllis had no idea where he was.

After the plane landed in Helsinki to a crowd of reporters, the INS returned Heikkila to California, where he stayed until his death in 1966. While his return was a victory for Heikkila and his supporters, his fatal heart attack at age 54 and Phyllis’ subsequent battle to obtain social security benefits attest to the often invisible effects of deportation campaigns, even on those who succeed in remaining in the United States.

Operation Racial Slur

Elevating stories like Heikkila’s, immigrant rights advocates had some success preventing deportation, even of those accused of being communists during the McCarthyist red scare.

At the same time, under Commissioner Swing, the INS escalated its assault on immigrant communities with Operation Wetback. Claiming that undocumented Mexican immigrants were undermining the U.S. economy as well as importing subversive ideas of labor organizing, the INS under Operation Wetback attempted to “rid” California and the southwest of undocumented people.

General Swing had refused President’s Eisenhower’s invitation to deploy the army at the border, advising his old friend from West Point that using the army on civilians would surely violate the constitution and likely cause unnecessary bloodshed.

As its name proclaims, Operation Wetback misnamed immigrants with a slur often used against those crossing the Rio Grande or what many of them knew as the Rio Bravo, from Mexico to the United States. The racist term “wetback” collapsed the stories of many lives and struggles into a single word, a mass of people, a threat to real Americans.

During Operation Wetback, the INS raided Mexican American communities, detaining and deporting thousands, including legal residents and naturalized citizens, and broadcasting the merits of their work to a compliant media. Like the current regime of ICE terror, “Operation Wetback” violated the civil rights of undocumented and legal immigrants as well as U.S. citizens in its quest to control labor and dissent through increased militarization. And, as in contemporary Los Angeles and across the country, organizers on the ground contested Operation Wetback, offering legal support to those caught up in its dragnet.

Although masses of people are much harder to humanize than individuals, Woody Guthrie responded to the 1948 crash of a deportation flight that killed 32 people, 28 of them deportees, by writing a poem that was later set to music, “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos.” In it, Guthrie asks a question that remains urgent today:

Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?

The plane wreck at Los Gatos preceded Operation Wetback. But the song works as an anthem for immigrant rights organizers fighting Operation Wetback and similar campaigns of degradation, detention and deportation. It illustrates the struggle to name and humanize migrants against their dehumanization by both immigration policy and their misrepresentation in mass media.

Say Their Names

During the U.S.-backed “dirty wars” in Central America, thousands fled the School of the Americas-educated death squads, arriving in the United States as undocumented immigrants because their fear of persecution was rarely acknowledged in immigration courts. As faith congregations began to shelter these refugees, they learned their stories as well as Central American practices of sanctuary. These connections sparked the Sanctuary Movement in the United States and informed widespread opposition to U.S. funding for genocidal wars in the region.

At a time when the U.S. government moves towards the totalitarianism it has imposed around the world, it’s all the more important to learn the names and the stories of those targeted by the regime for detention and deportation. Anything this regime does to foreign-born people can and will also be done to those born here, as the current assaults on birthright citizenship and due process indicate.

The Movement for Black Lives teaches the power of saying the names of those targeted for death at police hands. Similarly, knowing the names and stories of immigrants amplifies the importance of their struggles.

We must continue to say the names of Kilmar Ábrego Armando Garcia and Mahmoud Khalil until all who are detained, incarcerated, and scheduled for illegal deportation flights are free.

July-August 2025, ATC 237