If it can happen to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, it can happen to you
The furor surrounding a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador isn’t a “distraction”
Audio By Carbonatix
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Every one of us should be outraged by the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland resident, construction worker, and father of three who was deported to El Salvador and sent to a maximum security prison in what the Trump administration admitted was “administrative error.”
Instead of correcting the mistake, however, President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are now doubling down and trying to alter reality — and some Democrats seem all too eager to help them by looking the other way.
But we should all be concerned about a wannabe U.S. dictator arbitrarily disappearing someone without due process to an unaccountable foreign black site.
These are the facts: Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador after a local gang started extorting his mother’s pupuseria by demanding cash payments and using threats of violence to coerce Garcia and his older brother to join their ranks. Fearing for their safety, the brothers fled to the U.S., and in 2012 Abrego Garcia illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas. He was only 16.
Eventually arriving in Maryland, Abrego Garcia began working construction and fell in love with a U.S. woman named Jennifer Vasquez Sura, helping her raise her children. While looking for work as a day laborer in a Home Depot parking lot in 2019, Abrego Garcia was arrested by police who claimed he was a member of the notorious gang MS-13, citing a confidential source.
The evidence linking him to the gang? According to legal proceedings, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) believed Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 because “he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat” and a hoodie emblazoned with images of U.S. presidents “with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth.”
In fact, no credible evidence has been produced linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13, and he has no criminal record.
While he was awaiting his deportation hearings, Abrego Garcia and Vasquez Sura married in 2019. Also that year, he applied for and was granted “withholding of removal” status by an immigration judge who explicitly barred Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador due to fears for his safety.
One fact that Trump and others have seized upon is that in 2021, Vasquez Sura filed a civil restraining order against Abrego Garcia, accusing him of “punching and scratching her, ripping her shirt, and leaving her bruised.”
Vasquez Sura, who said she was a survivor of domestic abuse from a previous relationship, stated she filed the restraining order “in case things escalated” but decided not to follow through with it.
“We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling,” she said in a statement. “Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation. Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.”
Following Abrego Garcia’s March 15 deportation, a federal judge ordered his return to the U.S. The decision was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this month.
Nevertheless, Trump has decided he is willing to die on this hill. Last week, he posted a photo on social media showing the tattoos on Abrego Garcia’s hand — a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull — which, according to Trump, symbolize the characters “MS-13.”
“They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,” Trump alleged.
In other words, according to the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia looks like a gang member. Suffice it to say, this is not due process.
And Trump and his supporters will not stop here.
In an absurd White House press conference with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele last week, both leaders basically shrugged, alleging there was nothing they could do to retrieve Abrego Garcia.
Trump also ominously suggested that he wants to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador — many more.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” he said, telling Bukele, “You’ve got to build about five more places.”
In a social media post, Vice President JD Vance downplayed the entire incident, repeating the unproven claim that Abrego Garcia was a gang member.
“The entire American media and left wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien),” he wrote.
And it’s not just Trump’s allies on the right who would rather Abrego Garcia be disappeared from public view.
When asked for comment at a recent press conference, California Governor Gavin Newsom dismissed the furor as “the distraction of the day,” adding that calls to free Abrego Garcia would only play into Trump’s hands and make Democrats look like they are “defending MS-13.”
One fellow Democrat disagrees.
“I don’t think it’s ever wrong to stand up for the Constitution,” U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told NBC News on Sunday.
“I think Americans are tired of elected officials or politicians who are all finger to the wind,” Van Hollen said, adding that “anyone who can’t stand up for the Constitution and the right of due process doesn’t deserve to lead.”
One might be reminded of Michigan’s own Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who was recently and embarrassingly photographed hiding her face behind folders in the Oval Office while Trump signed a series of bizarre executive orders attacking his critics.
Apparently sensing the shifting political winds, and only serving to prove Van Hollen’s point, Newsom eventually did a complete 180.
“Don’t be distracted,” Newsom wrote in a social media post. “The Trump Administration’s refusal to obey court rulings needs to be called out.”
Unfortunately, Newsom and Whitmer are widely regarded as the next potential leaders of the Democratic Party.
After initial resistance from the El Salvador government, Sen. Van Hollen managed to meet with Abrego Garcia last week, who said he was “traumitized” by his experience though he added he had been transferred to a lower-level facility.
“This case is not only about one man, as important as that is,” Van Hollen later said. “It is about protecting fundamental freedoms and the foundational principle of due process that the Constitution guarantees to everyone who resides in the United States.”
Without that, what do we have? Our leaders simply must do better.
