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kilmar abrego garcia
Trump Is Testing the Limits of Our Democracy—Will We Hold Firm?
The way we all react to these tests—from the disappearing of U.S. citizens to the threatening of judges—will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Jul 15, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship is a “test.”
Kids do it all the time. Throw a tantrum in the store demanding cookies and if the parents don’t remove them from the store right away, every visit will see the tantrums escalate. Testing the boundaries. When the test succeeds, the boundaries get moved and a new boundary gets tested, on and on until finally the child’s behavior is so egregious he’s stopped. Or he always gets away with everything and grows up to be Donald Trump.
We learn this early.
We’ve seen a series of these tests coming from the Trump administration, following the very specific and consistently repeated pattern that history tells us played out in the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, el Sisi, and pretty much every other person who took over a democracy and then, step-by-step turned it into a dictatorship.
Trump started testing racism as a political weapon when he came down the elevator at Trump Tower and spoke about “Mexican murderers and rapists” in front of what media reports said was a crowd he’d hired for $50 per person from a company that provides extras to movie and TV production companies.
While his initial goal was reportedly to get NBC to renew “Apprentice” and pay him more than Gwen Stefani, his racism test work out shockingly well; suddenly he was a serious contender for the party that had inherited the KKK vote when Democrats abandoned the South with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the 1960s.
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Another test was whether the exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies that he and his family had used to hustle real estate could work in politics.
He quickly discovered that GOP base voters—after decades of having uncritically (slavishly, even) swallowed lies about trickle-down economics, “evil union bosses,” and the “importance of small government”—were more than happy to embrace or ignore, as the occasion demanded, his prevarications.
From there, Trump tested exactly how gullible his most fervent supporters—and the media that fed them a daily diet of very profitable outrage and hate—would buy into a lie so audacious, so in defiance of both the law and common sense, so outside the bounds of normal patriotism, that they could be whipped into a murderous frenzy and kill three police officers while trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
The nation and our press reacted as if he’d failed that test, but when he was able to cow enough senators to avoid being convicted in his impeachment trial, he knew he’d won.
Now he’s again testing how far he can go.
George Retes is a 25-year-old Hispanic natural-born American citizen and disabled Army veteran working as a security guard at a legal marijuana operation in California. When it was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he got in his car and tried to drive away to avoid getting in the middle of what he saw as trouble.
Masked agents chased him down, smashed the window of his car and pepper-sprayed him in the face, dragged him out of his car, and disappeared him.
Testing.
Will Democrats make a stink? Will the media make it more than a one-day story? Will any Republicans break rank and stand against his excesses? Was it even mentioned on any of the Sunday shows? How far can he go next time?
So far, Trump thinks he’s winning these tests. The outrages are coming so fast and furious that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of them, just like in Germany in 1933 and Chile in 1973.
Retes wasn’t the only U.S. citizen who’s been arrested or detained by ICE; they’ve gone after a mayor, a member of Congress, and even assaulted a United States senator.
A 71-year-old grandmother was assaulted and handcuffed by masked agents. Axios documents others; as the CNN headline on the story about other U.S. citizens being snatched notes: “‘We Are Not Safe in America Today:’ These American Citizens Say They Were Detained by ICE.”
Testing.
After years of hysteria on the billionaire-owned sewer of Fox “News” about our nation’s first Black president deploying “FEMA Camps” to detain white conservatives, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others in Las Vegas, ranting that Federal Emergency Management Agency Camps set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and... confiscating guns.”
He murdered those innocent concertgoers, he said, to “wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” saying, “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
Now those detention facilities conservatives feared has come into being, as Republicans in Congress just funded concentration camps like “Alligator Auschwitz” in multiple states across America.
Visiting congress members claim inmates are packed over 30 to a cage, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) reporting her horror when she was shown that “they get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth, where they poop, in the same unit.”
Testing.
We recently learned via CBS News from a whistleblower and now-released texts that Trump’s former lawyer and now-nominee for a lifetime federal judgeship, Emil Bove, then working in the Justice Department, advised the administration officials to tell federal courts “fuck you” when they ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran hellhole concentration camp.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
For months, the administration appears to have followed his obviously unconstitutional and illegal advice. Republicans want him on the federal bench anyway.
Testing.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who Trump official Erez Reuveni said had been deported “in error”—described how he was treated in that El Salvadoran concentration camp, telling his attorneys and the court that he’d been repeatedly beaten, then forced to kneel from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am “with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion.”
He had committed no crime and was deported in open violation of a federal judge who demanded the plane either not take off or return before landing in El Salvador. The Trump administration simply and contemptibly ignored the court’s order.
Testing.
In a White House visit, Trump told the El Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele (who refers to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator”), that he wants to send American citizens to that country’s torture centers.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump said as the two men laughed. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”
Testing.
Meanwhile, ICE detention facilities are also holding U.S. citizens like Andrea Velez, 32, who was snatched by masked agents during a raid in Los Angeles. As LA’s ABC News affiliate Channel 7 reported:
Velez, a marketing designer and Cal Poly Pomona graduate, was arrested Tuesday morning after her family dropped her off at work. According to her attorneys, Velez's sister and mother saw her being approached and grabbed by masked men with guns, so they called the Los Angeles Police Department to report a kidnapping.
Police responded to the scene near Ninth and Spring streets and realized the kidnapping call was actually a federal immigration-enforcement operation.
She’s out of the detention facility now, but on $5000 bond; ICE apparently has plans for her future.
Testing.
And now Trump is telling us he wants to strip a natural-born U.S. citizen comedienne—who’s made jokes about him that pissed him off—of her U.S. citizenship, “Because,” he says, “of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Hitler gained the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933; by July of that same year, a mere six months later, he’d revoked the citizenship of thousands for the crimes of being “socialists,” “communists,” Jews, or journalists and commentators who’d written or spoken ill of him. Trump appears to be just a bit behind him on that timeline.
Testing.
Trump wants NPR and PBS defunded as soon as possible, having issued an Executive Order to that effect, and has ordered his Federal Communications Commission to launch investigations that could strip major TV networks of their broadcast licenses if they continue to report on him and his activities in ways that offend him. He shut down the Voice Of America, ending America’s promotion of democracy across the world. He kicked The Associated Press out of the White House press pool.
Testing.
Trump has declared large strips of land along the southern border to be federalized territory and put the American military in charge of policing the area, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prohibits the military from performing any sort of police function against civilians.
Testing.
When students spoke out on campus against Trump ally and longtime Kushner family friend Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s murderous assault of Gaza and support for settlers stealing West Bank land from Palestinians, armed and masked federal agents began arresting those students, imprisoning them for their First Amendment-protected speech.
Then Trump went after their universities, bringing several to heel just as Orbán has in Hungary and Putin has in Russia.
Testing.
Yesterday, six Republicans on the Supreme Court said that Trump could wholesale mass- fire employees of the Department of Education, essentially shutting down an agency created and funded by Congress in defiance of the constitutional requirement that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent, flaming in extreme alarm at her colleagues:
This decision] hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out... The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.
Or maybe the six Republican justices on the court are just scared? After all, judges across the country are being threatened, having pizzas delivered to their homes in the middle of the night by way of saying, “We know where you live.” This after U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl, was fatally shot at their New Jersey home by a gunman disguised as a pizza delivery driver. Her husband was also shot, but survived.
A few months ago, after one of Trump’s rants against judges who rule against him, Judge Salas told the press:
Hundreds of pizzas have been delivered to judges all over this country in the last few months. And in the last few weeks—judges’ children. And now Daniel’s name was being weaponized to bring fear to judges and their children. You’re saying to those judges—“You want to end up like Judge Salas? You want to end up like Judge Salas’ son?”
Testing.
What’s next? Will we see Americans who’ve spoken poorly of Trump on social media arrested like both Orbán and Putin do?
Will more students end up on the ground or in jail?
Will more judges be charged with the crime of running their own courtrooms in ways Trump and ICE dislike?
More mayors arrested?
More Democratic Senators taken to the ground and handcuffed?
Will Americans start being disappeared in numbers that can’t be ignored? Deported to El Salvador and South Sudan?
Will journalists be destroyed by massive libel suits or imprisoned for what they write?
Will more judges bend to Trump’s will because they’re either terrified or, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, have apparently become radicalized by Fox “News” or other right-wing propaganda outlets?
The way we all react to these tests will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Former President Barack Obama says Democrats need to “toughen up.” While true, it would have been nice to hear “tough” words of outrage, warning, and leadership from him and former Vice President Kamala Harris over the past six months. And former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
See you on July 17—this Thursday—for some “good trouble.”
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Kilmar Abrego García and the Trump Torture Regime
In the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land).
Jul 14, 2025
I didn’t want to write this article.
In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence. But other excellent writers beat me to that one.
So instead, I reluctantly find myself once again focusing on U.S. torture, a subject I’ve studied and written about since the autumn of 2001, including in a couple of books. I’d naively hoped never to have to do so again, but here we are.
The Rendition of Kilmar Abrego García
This March, the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego García to a notorious hellhole in El Salvador. That mega-prison is known by the acronym CECOT for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. (In English, the Terrorism Confinement Center.) There he was beaten and tortured in violation of both this country’s immigration and federal laws, as well as the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, or CAT, to which the United States is a signatory.
It didn’t matter that Abrego García was in this country legally and that, as a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge, his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.” In fact, the Department of Justice later rewarded its own lawyer’s honesty by firing him.
Kilmar Abrego García is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States “without inspection” (that is, undetected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in 2011. He was 16-years-old and fleeing his home country where, “[b]eginning around 2006, gang members stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion,” according to a civil suit filed against various U.S. officials. “He then made his way to the state of Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, resided.”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition.
Abrego García lived in Maryland for years, working as a day laborer. In 2016, he began a relationship with a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, and in 2018, they moved in together. They conceived a child and Abrego García did construction work to support the family, which included his wife’s two children, both U.S. citizens. In March 2019, however, he and three other men were arrested outside a Home Depot by Prince George’s County, Maryland police. They turned him over to ICE, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence that he was a member of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13. The “evidence” in question included the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant had identified him to a detective as a member of an MS-13 group operating out of Long Island, New York, where he had never lived. (The detective was later suspended for unrelated infractions.)
After almost six months in detention, during which time his son was born, an immigration court granted Abrego García a “withholding of removal.” That meant he would be allowed to remain in the United States and could legally work here, because he was believed to face genuine danger were he to be deported to El Salvador. He was required to check in annually with ICE, which he did, most recently in early January 2025.
Things were going relatively well. He had become a union member and was employed full time as a first-year sheet metal apprentice on a trajectory toward a rewarding career in the building trades. On March 12, 2025, however, everything changed. He was driving home from his jobsite after picking up his son (who is deaf in one ear, has intellectual disabilities, and does not speak) when ICE officers pulled his car over and arrested him. Officers gave his wife just 10 minutes to arrive and get their child, threatening to turn him over to Child Protective Services if she missed that deadline.
After being shuttled from state to state, Abrego García ended up at a Louisiana detention center, from which he was indeed deported to El Salvador along with several other men late on the evening of March 15. The people detaining him kept saying he would have a chance to speak to a judge about his legal status, but that was a blatant lie. As his court filing recounts:
He repeatedly requested judicial review. Officials consistently responded with false assurances that he would see a judge, deliberately misleading Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to prevent him from taking actions to assert his legal rights. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia only realized the true nature of his dire situation upon arrival at the airport in El Salvador, at which point it was too late to challenge the unlawful deportation.
Meanwhile, his wife had been desperately trying to find him by checking ICE’s online Detainee Locator System and calling detention centers around the country. Days after he’d already been shipped to El Salvador, the Locator System continued to say that he was at the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa, Texas.
In fact, Kilmar Abrego García had been disappeared. His wife might never have found him if it weren’t for a photo someone sent her from an article about more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants dispatched to CECOT in El Salvador at the same time. His face wasn’t visible, but she recognized him from two scars on his shaved head and some of his personal (but not gang-related) tattoos. She was well aware of CECOT’s reputation as a brutal mega-prison, a site of organized physical and psychological torture.
Once she knew where her husband was, efforts to get him back began. In April, a federal district judge ordered his return, a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court (which has in these months rarely sided against U.S. President Donald Trump). But the government dragged its feet, refusing to abide by either court’s ruling. Eventually, after maintaining for months that Abrego García was beyond its reach, the Department of Justice reversed itself and brought him back to the United States to face charges of human smuggling in Tennessee, where he remains in federal prison today. Those charges, based on a 2016 Tennessee traffic stop, appear flimsy at best.
Echoes of the “War on Terror”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition. That U.S. government practice of shipping detainees to torture sites around the world was a feature of the “Global War on Terror” (declared by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks). As early as 2002, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman quoted a U.S. official in Afghanistan, who told them: “We don’t kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them.”
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2011:
Detainees were… unlawfully rendered [transferred] to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured.... Evidence suggests that torture in such cases was not a regrettable consequence of rendition; it may have been the purpose.
Abrego García was unlawfully rendered to El Salvador where, according to his suit, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings, and psychological torture. Specifically,
Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.
In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.
Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states, “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination. In the unlikely event that, in the future, district federal courts and then the Supreme Court prohibit the Trump administration from shipping detainees off to countries with well-known torture risks, its officials are likely to resort to paying off other, non-torturing nations to serve as trans-shipment sites.
Not the Only Victim
Kilmar Abrego García may turn out to be the most fortunate of the hundreds of migrants shipped from the U.S. to El Salvador in March. An intervention by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen pried him out of CECOT and got him transferred to a different Salvadoran prison. (It’s unclear why the Trump administration finally decided to bring him back to the United States.) Although he remains in federal custody, at least for the moment, he isn’t languishing incommunicado in El Salvador.
The 238 Venezuelan detainees sent to CECOT at the same time haven’t been that lucky. Like Abrego García, they were labeled terrorists and deported without benefit of due process. Trump and his aides called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.” But as the investigative journalism organization ProPublica revealed, the administration knew all along that those allegations were false. As the data they reviewed indicates:
The government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping, and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
Yet it seems likely that, without any judicial proceedings whatsoever, those men have received life sentences in a Salvadoran hellhole for the crime of seeking a better life in the United States.
It Could Happen to You
Most of the discussion in the press and in legal and philosophical circles about the U.S. use of torture during the war on terror assumed the legitimacy of torture’s main pretext: the need to extract lifesaving information from unwilling detainees. At the time, some arguments against it focused on torture’s efficacy: did torturing people truly produce “actionable intelligence”? Others took that effectiveness for granted, while questioning its ethics: Could the torture of a few be justified to save the many? The apotheosis of that false conundrum was the “ticking time bomb” problem.
I say “false conundrum” because such gathering of information is almost always a pretext for a program of institutionalized state torture. Its real political purpose is to maintain the power of the torturing regime by generating fear in anyone who might oppose it. This has been proven repeatedly in studies of torture regimes from Latin America to the Philippines and was no less true, in an oblique way, for the well-documented U.S. torture program of those “war on terror” years.
Anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times.
Most torture regimes directly target members of their own societies, hoping to frighten them into compliance through the knowledge that opponents of the regime are being tortured and that they could be next. The Bush-Cheney administration, however, used torture more indirectly to remind Americans that they were in mortal danger from the country’s enemies and that only the administration could protect them from that. The proof of that danger was the very fact that a self-evidently good government nonetheless was forced to commit such terrible acts at CIA “black sites” globally and elsewhere.
Today, in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.
But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”
Building Solidarity
Institutionalized state torture destroys social solidarity by sowing distrust. Writing about Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship, Lawrence Weschler described how that government assigned every citizen a letter “grade” of A, B, or C. A’s were deemed good citizens and eligible for state employment; B’s were suspect and eligible only for private employment; C’s lost all their rights and posed a danger to anyone who hired or associated with them. “And,” wrote Weschler, “the point was that anyone at any time could suddenly find himself reclassified as a ‘C’—because, after all, they knew everything.” (And how much more do “they” know about us today, now that federal data about each one of us is rapidly being centralized and consolidated?)
One effect of Uruguay’s torture regime was a profound social isolation. As one respondent told Weschler:
Fear exterminated all social life in the public realm. Nobody spoke in the streets for fear of being heard… One tried not to make new friends, for fear of being held responsible for their unknown pasts. One suspected immediately those who were more open or less afraid, of being “agents provocateurs” of the intelligence services. Rumors about torture, arrests, mistreatments were so magnified by our terror as to take on epic proportions.
Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity. I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come.
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Abrego Garcia’s Attorneys Say He Faced Beatings and ‘Psychological Torture’ in El Salvador Prison
While the prisoners were kneeling, guards allegedly kept watch over them and would physically strike anyone who fell over from exhaustion, allege attorneys representing Abrego Garcia.
Jul 03, 2025
Attorneys representing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant whom the Trump administration wrongly sent to El Salvador's infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), are alleging that he and other detainees at the site were subjected to physical abuse and psychological torture.
In a court filing published on Wednesday evening, Abrego Garcia's attorneys write that their client "was subjected to severe mistreatment upon arrival at CECOT, including but not limited to severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture."
The filing describes Abrego Garcia and approximately 20 other inmates "being struck with wooden batons" after arriving at the facility as they were frogmarched to their cell, where guards would subsequently force them to kneel from 9:00 pm until 6:00 am While the prisoners were kneeling, guards allegedly kept watch over them and would physically strike anyone who fell over from exhaustion. The complaint adds that "during this time... Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself."
The complaint alleges officials at the prison would repeatedly threaten to transfer Abrego Garcia to cells that contained gang members who would "tear" him apart. These threats were made more menacing, the attorneys state, because "Abrego Garcia repeatedly observed prisoners in nearby cells who he understood to be gang members violently harm each other with no intervention from guards or personnel. Screams from nearby cells would similarly ring out throughout the night without any response from prison guards on personnel."
During Abrego Garcia's first two weeks at the facility, the attorneys write, he lost approximately 31 pounds.
The Trump administration last month complied with a Supreme Court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to United States after it acknowledged months earlier that he had been improperly deported to El Salvador. Upon his return, the United States Department of Justice promptly hit him with human smuggling charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.
President Donald Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have also accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of the gang MS-13, although they have produced no evidence to back up that assertion.
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