President Donald Trump’s administration unlawfully shipped Kilmar Abrego Garcia to an infamous prison in El Salvador — his home nation where a judge barred him from being deported — where the Maryland man says he was tortured.
Trump officials refused to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., as the Supreme Court had ordered, for nearly two months, before suddenly bringing him back to face new criminal charges in Tennessee. A magistrate judge found the government’s evidence against Abrego Garcia was “simply insufficient” to justify his incarceration, and quickly ordered his release on bail.
The Trump administration has worked diligently to ensure that this is bad news for Abrego Garcia: If his release goes forward, as this judge ordered, the Trump administration intends to deport Abrego Garcia as fast as it can, without concluding the criminal case against him. The administration could send him either to El Salvador, if it can strike down his existing “protection from removal” order, or to an undetermined third country like the war-torn South Sudan, where the Supreme Court just allowed Trump officials to deport eight migrants.
The Trump administration’s ongoing legal strategy with Abrego Garcia can best be summed up as: Heads I win, tails you get sent back to El Salvador — or maybe South Sudan or Libya, or some other creatively violent or cruel locale. We’ll let you know, when we feel like it.
In March, the Trump administration sent Abrego Garcia and hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to CECOT, an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador, in open defiance of a court order. Trump officials renditioned these men to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 wartime law, without giving them an opportunity to challenge their removal. They were deported based on specious claims that the Venezuelans are members of a gang the president declared a terrorist organization.
Officials have claimed that Abrego Garcia is a member of the violent gang MS-13. The magistrate judge in Tennessee found their evidence unpersuasive, leading the administration to unveil its alternative plan to punish Abrego Garcia.
This punishment is not simply necessary because Abrego Garcia’s lawyers keep beating the administration in court. For senior Trump officials, much of the administration’s cruel deportation agenda rests on this one case — on this one guy’s fate.
According to various Trump administration officials and other sources close to the president, one key reason the government has been fighting so hard on this, at first to keep him imprisoned in El Salvador, and now to keep punishing him, is that officials believe that if they back down on the Abrego Garcia case, it could set a precedent that opens the floodgates to other legal challenges. “Going soft” on this, as one senior Trump appointee puts it, could potentially be used against the administration in court, in challenges not only to different aspects of their immigration crackdowns, but to other ways in which Trump is wielding executive power that have little or nothing to do with immigration, per se.
Indeed, there’s a fear among the MAGA political and legal elite that failing to declare victory in the Abrego Garcia case could make it harder for them to sustain their deployment of the Alien Enemies Act, the invocation of which has been a policy dream of the president, top White House official Stephen Miller, and other Trumpland denizens for years.
“The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything,” another close Trump adviser says. “That is why you gotta stand your ground on everything against the left, including on the [Abrego Garcia] situation.”
Trump’s administration is treating Abrego Garcia so aggressively “because he’s a symbol of what they’re doing,” an immigration lawyer tells Rolling Stone. “He represents their failure to keep people silent in CECOT. He represents everything that they did wrong when it comes to these removals.”
It remains to be seen whether Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis, who has presided over the original lawsuit to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, will attempt to block the administration from deporting Abrego Garcia to a third country without due process — or at least a real opportunity to plead his case that he would be at risk of being tortured or killed in whatever third country the Trump administration decides to send him to.
If she does, Trump officials will no doubt attempt to escalate the matter to the Supreme Court, which the administration has on “speed dial,” as liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor recently put it.
The court initially unanimously demanded the Trump administration undo Abrego Garcia’s unlawful deportation and “facilitate” his return to the U.S., and it also issued a ruling blocking the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants to prison in El Salvador without due process.
Since then, it has issued a series of rulings deferring to Trump and greenlighting his most authoritarian aims — including two decisions ensuring the president can deport migrants, without meaningful due process, to South Sudan, a country the State Department warns Americans not to visit “due to crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”
“Violent crime, such as carjackings, shootings, ambushes, assaults, robberies, and kidnappings are common throughout South Sudan,” the State Department says. “Foreign nationals have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, armed robberies, and other violent crimes.”
In an interview released by Politico on Friday, Trump’s “Border Czar” Tom Homan indicated that the administration isn’t bothering to track the migrants it just sent to South Sudan.
“As far as we’re concerned, they’re free,” Homan said. “They’re no longer in our custody. They’re living in Sudan. And will they stay in Sudan? I don’t know.”
Asked if those migrants are being detained in South Sudan, Homan said, “I don’t know.”
The Trump administration clearly hopes to wash its hands of Abrego Garcia the same way — so it can do the same with countless more people just like him.
www.rollingstone.com
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