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Notes -
There is substantial overlap between criminal justice reformers who take issue with the US' policy of extreme leniency towards police misconduct and people who take issue with sending people to Salvadoran gulags. Conversely, there is a generalized skepticism towards due process common amongst both hardline deportation advocates and tough-on-crime/back-the-blue types.
That aside, that's not how things worked. If the police violate your rights, you can usually at least get a court order telling them to stop doing that (and potentially scuttling any case against you), even if they can't return the lost time/reputation/emotional well-being. You can often obtain damages as well.
Qualified immunity is not what people seem to think it is. QI protects government staff from personal liability in carrying out their duties (shifting the burden onto taxpayers), even when they egregiously fuck up; it doesn't indemnify them from criminal charges. The bigger issue there is simply that the criminal justice system bends over backwards to give law enforcement officers accused of misconduct the benefit of the doubt. If a cop murders you, it's still murder, but it's exceeding rare for cops to get charged and even rarer for them to get convicted.
(For example, the notorious Daniel Shaver case, the city ended up paying about $10m in damages to Shaver's relatives even though the officer was acquitted)
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