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kilmar abrego garcia
Return of Abrego Garcia a Major Blow to Trump
It would be very helpful to American democracy if the media would do its job and focus on the fact that the Garcia case represents a significant defeat for Trump and win for the rule of law.
Jun 10, 2025
In a surprise development, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the man living in Maryland illegally deported to El Salvador was returned to the United States to face charges of transporting undocumented migrants. For months, the Trump Administration and the judicial system had been odds over returning Garcia to the United States. The Supreme Court had ruled that the Trump Administration had to “facilitate” Garcia’s return but not “effectuate” it.
It is essential to note that the Trump Administration admitted in court documents that they had inappropriately deported Garcia to El Salvador where he was imprisoned in a notorious maximum security prison. In an oval office meeting in April with Salvadoran President Bukele, Trump made it clear that Garcia would not ever be returning to the United States. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Garcia “is never coming back to our country.”
The standoff between the Trump Administration and the courts led to talks of a constitutional crisis. Indeed, it was hard to see how the impasse would be resolved. Then, without any warning, Garcia was moved from El Salvador to face charges in Tennessee of smuggling undocumented immigrants. Instead of her blanket statement that Garcia would never return to American soil, Bondi now said that “Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women. This is what American justice looks like.”
The charges against Garcia are hotly disputed by his attorneys. Democrats on Capitol Hill are also challenging the evidence against Garcia. On CNN, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal commented: “And I’ve heard again and again and again, as a prosecutor, as a United States attorney, federal prosecutor, as well as state attorney general, charges are not evidence. And so far, we’ve seen no evidence.”
Garcia’s return to the United States, even though he faces serious charges, is a real victory for the rule of law. As Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen put it in a statement: “As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights—and the rights of all. The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
For reasons that escape me, the mainstream media has not pointed out that Garcia’s return to the United States is a huge victory for the rule of law and a defeat for President Trump. Garcia is now in a judicial system facing charges, which will be tested in a court of law. His case will not be adjudicated by the whims of the Trump administration.
Recent events suggest that the Trump team realizes the importance of Garcia’s return to America. Trump is a master of the political counterpunch which distracts the media and public’s attention from the matter at hand. I strongly doubt that Trump would have deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell protests had he not suffered a defeat in the Garcia case. It is, as the New York Times put it, the political fight that President Trump is looking for.
The hard task for Democrats is to respond to Trump’s provocations while keeping the focus on the rights to a fair trial, due process and peaceful protest. It would be very helpful to American democracy if the media would do its job and focus on the fact that the Garcia case represents a major defeat for Trump and a victory for the rule of law.
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Maryland Lawmaker Denied Access to Abrego García During El Salvador Visit
The Supreme Court ordered the White House to facilitate Kilmar Abrego García's return to the United States more than a month ago.
May 27, 2025
"If there is nothing to hide, cut the crap," said a Maryland congressman late Monday after being denied a visit with his constituent, Kilmar Abrego García, who is being held in a prison in El Salvador after being wrongly expelled by the Trump administration to the Central American country.
Rep. Glenn Ivey, a Democrat, said he had made contact with the Salvadoran ambassador before making the trip to El Salvador and had made a formal request to see Abrego García—more than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to "facilitate" the Maryland resident's return to the United States.
"We came here to visit him today, and now they're telling us we've got to go all the way back to San Salvador to get a permit," said Ivey. "That's ridiculous... They knew we were coming, they knew why we were coming, and they know we have the right to do this."
Abrego García, a Salvadoran national with no criminal record, entered the U.S. without authorization in 2011 and had been living with his wife and children and working as a sheet metal worker in Maryland.
He was one of more than 100 migrants who were swiftly expelled to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in March under a $6 million deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
He was accused of being a member of the gang MS-13, which Abrego García's family has denied. The Trump administration based its actions on an accusation from an anonymous police informant who said in 2019 that Abrego García's Chicago Bulls cap was indicative of his gang membership after he was detained for loitering. That year, a judge ruled that Abrego García should not be deported to his home country because he had a credible fear of torture by a local gang.
The White House has spread misinformation about Abrego García, including an image that was edited to make it appear like his tattoos signified MS-13 membership.
Last Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said her repeated efforts to get the Trump administration to disclose information about Abrego García's case has been "an exercise in utter frustration."
Department of Justice lawyers told the judge that details about the case are protected under "state secrets" privileges.
Xinis called on the government to provide legal reasoning for invoking those privileges and said she would issue an official order.
Administration officials have alternately claimed they have no way of returning him to the U.S. after he was deported due to an "administrative error," and Bukele has said the same. But Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. questioned a Department of Justice lawyer earlier this month about President Donald Trump's claim that he could bring Abrego García back to the U.S. with a phone call.
Abrego García was initially sent to CECOT, which is notorious for its poor conditions and reports of torture and physical abuse, but just before U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) visited him in April, he was moved to a lower-security prison.
Ivey said Monday that he had planned to assess the conditions of the facility during his visit, noting the Democrats in Congress have not received information about how U.S. taxpayer dollars are being spent to house Abrego García.
"We need to get that," Ivey said in a press briefing. "We've got the power in the purse. We've got a constitutional obligation to make sure that money is being used in the right way, but we can't figure that out if we don't even know how much is being spent."
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Trump: the Kidnapper-and-Chief
How many other immigrants and refugees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia are now languishing in El Salvadorean prisons without the benefit of public pressure to challenge the conditions of their detention?
May 19, 2025
I don’t know about you, but the news continues to stress me out. Trump administration officials are using any excuse they can think of to detain and deport people whose points of view—or whose very existence on U.S. soil—seem to threaten their agenda.
Deportations to El Salvador
In March, the U.S. government sent 238 men to a notorious Salvadoran mega-prison where they no longer have contact with family members or lawyers, and where overcrowding and cruel practices like solitary confinement, or far worse, seem to be commonplace. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released few details about who the men were, but when pressed, DHS officials claimed that most of them were members of Tren de Agua, a Venezuelan criminal gang.
However, documents obtained by journalists revealed that about 75% of the detainees—179 of them—had no criminal records. They had, in essence, been kidnapped. Among them was a young Venezuelan make-up artist who was in U.S. custody while awaiting a political asylum hearing. After he made a legal border crossing into this country, immigration officials determined that he was being targeted because he was gay and his political views. However, DHS officials claimed that the man’s crown tattoos meant he was a member of Tren de Agua. It mattered not at all that those crowns had his parents’ names underneath them, suggesting that his father and mother were his king and queen. As they have admitted, government officials are unable to substantiate why men like him were detained and deported without any legal process, though a spokeswoman for DHS claimed that many of them “are actually terrorists… They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”
At the rate we’re going, it’s conceivable that someday you or I might end up in their shoes—at a border crossing in some other country asking to be accepted there because we fear for our lives in our own land.
Among those now detained in El Salvador is much-publicized Maryland resident and construction worker Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had lived in the U.S. since fleeing gang violence in his native El Salvador as a teenager. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested and detained him while he was driving with his five-year-old son in the backseat of his car. Trump administration officials did finally concede that he had been detained and deported due to an “administrative error.” However, they later backtracked, claiming (without evidence) that he belonged to the violent criminal gang MS-13. The case rose to national prominence thanks to protest demonstrations and federal court orders for the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. (No such luck, of course!)
I can’t help wondering just how many other immigrants and refugees like him are now languishing in El Salvadorean prisons (or perhaps those of other countries) without the benefit of public pressure to challenge the conditions of their detention. And we can all keep wondering unless the Trump administration offers such deportees due process so that the legal system can vet their identities and the reasons for seizing and imprisoning them.
Asylum Seekers in Panama
These days, the horrors pile up so fast that it’s hard to keep track of them. It seems like ages ago, but only last February the administration sent 300 asylum seekers to Panama City under the Immigration and Nationality Act, which allows State Department officials to deport citizens of foreign countries whose presence they believe to be contrary to this country’s interests. After the Panamanian authorities locked the migrants in a hotel without access to their families or outsiders, they told them they had to return to their countries of origin.
Many of them feared for their lives if they did so. Among them was a young Cameroonian woman who had fled her country because the government there had imprisoned and tortured her for weeks after soldiers in her town accused her of membership in a separatist political group, and a mother and daughter who had fled Turkey for fear of imprisonment for participating in peaceful anti-government protests there.
When 70 of the asylum seekers refused the government’s order to return to their countries of origin, Panamanian officials sent them to a jungle camp where they lacked adequate food, clean water, or privacy of any sort. After an uproar from human rights activists, the detainees were finally released and left to find legal asylum elsewhere. Several told journalists that they were never even given the opportunity to apply for asylum upon entering the U.S., though American officials claimed—unlikely indeed!—that the migrants hadn’t told them that their lives were in danger.
Most difficult for me to stomach is the thought that those asylum seekers had fled to my country, assuming they would be protected by the rule of law and presumed innocent until proven guilty, not robbed of their freedom. At the rate we’re going, it’s conceivable that someday you or I might end up in their shoes—at a border crossing in some other country asking to be accepted there because we fear for our lives in our own land. And I would hope that whomever we spoke to would at least be willing to hear our stories before deciding to ship us elsewhere.
In their ordinariness, some photos I’ve seen of those deported immigrant families remind me of my own family. In one, for instance, a mother is stroking the face of her distraught young son who, rather than just having a bad day at school as mine might have, was stuck in a foreign city without his belongings, friends, or access to places to play. Many of us, especially military families like mine, know what it’s like to be stuck at a waystation without our possessions and the various contraptions (cooking equipment, kid-sized furniture, cleaning products) that make having a family comfortable. Now, imagine that scenario with no end in sight and no one who even speaks your language to help you out. Imagine parenting through that!
Of course, give the Trump administration some credit. It hasn’t opposed all migrants fleeing persecution. In fact, the president recently invited Afrikaners of South Africa, the White ethnic minority whose grandparents were the architects of that country’s apartheid system of racial segregation, to seek refugee status in the United States on the basis of supposed anti-White racial discrimination in their homeland. (At the same time, of course, Marco Rubio’s State Department tossed the Black South African ambassador out of this county!)
Detaining Student Activists and Expelling U.S. Citizens
As the State Department revokes the green cards of hundreds of students in the U.S. for exercising their first amendment rights, at least several—maybe more—have been detained indefinitely under the Immigration and Nationalities Act. Among them, pro-Palestinian student-activist Mahmoud Khalil is being held at a remote detention facility in Louisiana, separated from his family in New York City, where his son was recently born while Mahmoud was in captivity. The government is considering sending him back to Syria where he grew up in a refugee camp or to Algeria where he is still a citizen. The Trump administration wrote on social media that his is “the first arrest of many to come.”
Apparently, the administration is casting a very wide net as it detains and deports people. In early April, The Washington Postreported that the authorities had detained at least seven U.S. citizens, among them children, including a 10-year-old who was being rushed to a hospital when immigration officers detained her family and sent them to Mexico, where they remain in hiding. More recently, the administration deported several U.S. citizens, including three children, one of whom, a 4-year-old, had late-stage cancer and was sent off to Honduras without his medications. His mother was given no opportunity to consult with his father who remained in the U.S.
We need to recognize that all too many of us have been looking the other way while “our” government detains people it doesn’t like in settings where it’s ever easier to violate their human rights.
I could go on, including with the recent news that the Trump administration has asked wartime Ukraine to take in deportees and is now reportedly preparing to send migrants to Libya.
These people were all detained and deported without due process, no less being allowed to challenge their detention and deportation through the court system. Due process should afford anyone in this country, no matter their legal status, the right to know why they are being detained and adequate notice of their possible deportation, as well as access to legal counsel so that they could challenge government decisions about their future.
Apparently, for the leaders of this administration, mere words and images—crown tattoos on alleged Venezuelan gang members, students peacefully protesting, or even apparently simply having brown skin—trigger fear and the impulse to detain and deport.
The Legacies of America’s War on Terror
None of this is entirely new. During the first two decades after the attacks of September 11, 2001, our government normalized extrajudicial detention and deportation as part of its Global War on Terror under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney announced that the government would “need to work the dark side” and “use any means at our disposal” to eradicate terror. According to a joint report by the Costs of War Project and Human Rights Watch, the U.S. extrajudicially moved at least 119 foreign Muslims who were considered terror suspects to “black sites” (secret CIA prisons) in foreign countries with more lax human rights standards, including Afghanistan, Lithuania, Romania, and Syria. There, those U.S. detainees underwent torture and mistreatment, including solitary confinement, electrocution, rape, sleep deprivation, and sometimes being hung upside down for hours at a time.
Even today, at Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba, where the U.S. government set up an offshore prison in January 2002, the government continues to hold 15 terror suspects from those years without the opportunity to challenge their status. And though that base has (as of yet at least) not come to house the thousands of migrants President Donald Trump initially imagined might be sent there, it has been one of the way stations through which the government has dispatched flights of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador via Honduras.
Though the U.S. did formally end its program of “extraordinary rendition” (that is, state-sponsored abductions), as the Costs of War Project and Human Rights Watch have suggested, such war on terror practices effectively “lowered the bar” for the way the U.S. and its allies would in the future treat all too many people.
A Way Forward?
And here we are in another nightmare moment. As historian Adam Hochschild has reminded us, America has indeed had “Trumpy”—maybe even “Trumpier”—moments in the past when the government empowered vigilantes to suppress peaceful dissent, censor media outlets, and imprison people for exercising their first amendment rights. Take the 1917 Espionage Act, which President Woodrow Wilson successfully lobbied for. It allowed prison terms of up to 20 years for anybody making “false reports” that might interfere with the government’s involvement in World War I or what were then considered “disloyal” or “abusive” statements about the U.S. government. In the years immediately following that law’s passage, dozens of peaceful Americans were sentenced to years of hard labor or detention in prisons.
During World War II, of course, the U.S. used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to detain tens of thousands of people of Japanese, German, and Italian descent for no other reason than their cultural heritage.
I cite such horrific examples not out of despair but from a strange sense of hopefulness. After all, in the end, this country did somehow manage to move past such horrors—even if, it seems, to turn to similar ones in the future. With that in mind, we must try to chart a better way forward today, so that you or I don’t end up behind bars, too. You’ve probably heard that President Trump is even talking about rebuilding and reopening Alcatraz, that infamous prison off the coast of San Francisco, a symbol of past mistreatment. (At least in his mind, Donald Trump’s archipelago of prisons is expanding fast.)
At a minimum, I think we need to recognize that all too many of us have been looking the other way while “our” government detains people it doesn’t like in settings where it’s ever easier to violate their human rights. And we need to acknowledge that the current administration is not simply an aberration but reflects past practices from periods in our history with which Americans were once comfortable. In other words, during certain eras, this country has proven to be all too Trumpy.
When I was a research fellow at Human Rights Watch, I was often asked to write press releases or short reports on violations of civil liberties in parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Back then, however, I never imagined that I would witness my own government similarly depriving people of their rights to due process here in the United States—even though that was already happening at those all-American CIA “black sites” globally and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
If Americans don’t unite around basic principles like due process, equal application of the law, and open and fact-based debate and inquiry, count on one thing: We’re in for a rough three years and eight months—and probably longer.
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