Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Wrongful Deportation and Imprisonment Reveals the Horrors of Trump's Authoritarianism
Though the Supreme Court handed the administration a defeat, the fight to bring him home should mobilize a broader resistance
The Supreme Court just ruled against Donald Trump in a case that could be a crucial breaking point in stopping his authoritarian agenda.
The Court upheld a ruling by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis requiring the Trump administration to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This is the poor guy who got pulled off the street, declared a gang member with no evidence, then sent off to a hellhole prison in El Salvador from which no one has ever been released.
When the Supreme Court decided to take up this case, we were all on pins and needles for about four days waiting to find out if habeas corpus and due process still exist in this country. On Thursday, in an unsigned, unanimous opinion with no dissents, the Court said that they do—with some possible wiggle room. The opinion instructed Judge Xinis to account for “the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” which has already set off a new round of bogus arguments in which the Trump administration tries to pretend it has no way of returning a man it is literally paying the government of El Salvador to keep in prison on our behalf.
We need to build massive public pressure to bring Kilmar home, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but also because this case could help unravel one of the worst aspects of Trump’s quest for unlimited power.
An Innocent Man
A report in The Atlantic summarizes the facts of the case:
Court filings show that Abrego Garcia … received a form of protected legal status known as “withholding of removal” from a U.S. immigration judge who found he would likely be targeted by gangs if deported back [to El Salvador]. …
The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization. …
[T]he gang label stems from a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland. During questioning, one of the men told officers that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him, filings show. Police did not identify him as a gang member.
This case is not merely unjust but so obviously unjust that nobody is really disputing it. The administration’s own lawyers admitted to the court that “Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”
That a man can be buried in a notoriously abusive foreign prison on a mere administrative error is bad enough. What is worse is the administration’s flippant refusal to correct the error. Here’s a little scene from an exchange in court between the judge in this case and the lawyer representing the government:
“Why can’t the United States get Mr. Abrego García back?” Xinis later asked.
“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question,” Reuveni said. “To date, I have not received an answer that is satisfactory.”
You may not be surprised that this lawyer, Erez Reuveni, was promptly fired for not being sufficiently eager to obstruct the court. According to The New York Times:
Mr. Reuveni, a respected 15-year veteran of the immigration division, asked the judge for 24 hours to persuade his “client,” the Trump administration, to begin the process of retrieving and repatriating Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Blanche, President Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, accused Mr. Reuveni of “engaging in conduct prejudicial to your client.” Mr. Blanche suspended Mr. Reuveni with pay, cut off access to his work email, and blocked him from performing any duties related to his job.
Judge Xinis responded by ordering the government to bring Abrego Garcia back so his case can be reviewed in American courts. The administration appealed to a Fourth Circuit panel, which unanimously refused to overturn the order. The court’s conclusion was succinct:
The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.
The Supreme Court has now sided with these lower courts. The question now is whether the Trump administration will continue to defy and obstruct these orders. It is very likely it will, because the administration knows bringing Kilmar home will set off a chain of events that exposes the wickedness of its policies.
The Worst of the Worst
The administration is refusing to return Abrego Garcia because it doesn’t want to admit that it can bring him back. Yet it definitely can. The U.S. government routinely arranges for the return of wrongly deported people, and in this case, the administration is actually paying the government of El Salvador to detain him, which implies that El Salvador is acting at its request—a request it could reverse.
Perhaps more important, the administration doesn’t want to concede that a judge can order it to change that request.
They don't want to admit this, because if they bring back this one man, they will have to bring back others. Abrego Garcia is not the only one who can show he was wrongly deported and imprisoned. He’s just the only one the government has admitted to so far. Return him, and you have to return more, probably most of them. A CBS News investigation found that three-quarters of the men we sent off to this same “anti-terrorism” prison have no criminal record. Many of the rest have only been convicted of minor, non-violent offenses like shoplifting. Yet they are now being indefinitely detained in a prison for “the worst of the worst.”
Once the government starts returning people, they will be back in our system where they will have access to lawyers, their families, and the media. They will talk about what happened to them and the brutality of the gulag where we sent them. This will then become one of the top stories in the country.
That’s important for a couple of reasons. One is that Donald Trump is already sinking in the polls, but the one issue still keeping him slightly afloat—believe it or not—is immigration. About half of Americans like that he is supposedly getting tough on immigrants. This is not to their credit, but many of them still have in their heads the fantasy version of Trump, the pop culture image they’ve been sold. In that fantasy, he is only targeting immigrant criminals, vicious “monsters.” But this case shows that it’s the other way around, and his administration is the real monster.
They’re the monsters who grabbed this innocent father off the streets while he was caring for his 5-year-old autistic son. They sent a gay makeup artist from Venezuela with a valid asylum petition to a prison for hardcore gangsters. They sent away another guy because he has an autism awareness tattoo. The people who did this are the monsters. They are the worst of the worst.
As this breaks through to the public, it has the potential to take one of the issues where Trump still has support and open the public’s eyes to the brutal reality.
Breaking Through
And this is breaking through. Joe Rogan, the podcaster who helped elevate Trump back into the White House, declared Kilmar’s case “horrific,” and a handful of prominent conservatives are expressing their reservations. 60 Minutes did a segment recently on the deportees and the brutal prison where they are being held.
As a personal anecdote, my father told me that in church on Sunday, when they asked for people who need the congregation’s prayers, he asked them to pray for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—and he didn’t hear about the case from me. Several other people came up to him afterward to thank him for mentioning it. This is not an ultra-conservative church, to be sure, but it’s also not the kind of progressive church that conspicuously advertises its tolerance with a rainbow flag out front.
What’s worse for the administration is that they deported a union man. Abrego Garcia is an apprentice with the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers, who have issued a statement in defense of “Brother Kilmar.” North America’s Building Trades Unions has made the same demand—and if you follow that link, watch as the union guys—most of them working-class whites—spring to their feet to demand Kilmar’s return.
The key point is about “breaking through.” Donald Trump’s abuses of executive power are well known to those of us who follow politics obsessively and are familiar with how the U.S. government is supposed to work. But the “normies,” average people going about their lives, often don’t know what’s happening. That’s especially true when things move this quickly. But Kilmar’s case is starting to break through that bubble and claim the attention of the normies.
We Are All Kilmar
There’s something else substantive that this will accomplish, because what Trump is really trying to do is destroy habeas corpus and due process—a thousand-year-old legal tradition in which the courts can require the government to bring an imprisoned man into the courtroom and justify why they are holding him. Trump wants to bypass those requirements if he can whisk someone out of the country fast enough and give them to a friendly dictator.
This is not just about immigrants. If they can disappear immigrants, eventually they will disappear critics. Without due process, a citizen has no opportunity to prove his legal status or assert his constitutional rights. The Abrego Garcia case is really about whether we have a police state for everyone. Forcing the administration to back down from these claims would be a substantive and essential victory. It would foreclose some of the worst outcomes for the U.S.
Finally, this case could do something else that will be essential to our recovery from the Trump years: It could break our current wave of irrational hatred for immigrants. Trump is only remotely popular right now because he has unleashed a wave of prejudice against immigrants. Abrego Garcia and the others put human faces on the victims of this prejudice. America has experienced spasms of hatred and racial animus before, and we’re always ashamed of them afterwards, once we are made to confront the awful things we did. I hope we can move on to being ashamed of this one before it gets any worse.
How to Fight Back
Donald Trump has transformed American government in the past few months with astonishing speed and little effective resistance: seizing the spending power from Congress, imposing a deportation police state, and making universities, law firms, and the media subservient to him.
People have been looking for ways to fight back, and it is important to resist Trump’s authoritarian takeover on as many fronts as possible, making him fight for every inch of territory. But this is one central battle that could make a significant dent in his authoritarian agenda.
Bring Kilmar Home. Demand it. Make him a symbol of Trump’s authoritarianism. By saving an innocent man, we can help save the constitutional order that protects us all.
This essay was adapted from a post originally published in The Tracinski Letter.
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
I hear there is going to be another country-wise rally on May Day. If this gentleman isn't back home by them, it ought to be a major push during the rally.
If you're not a billionaire, you don't register as a human worthy of respect and decent treatment. There are many, many of us in that category...