The flimsy basis of Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to MS-13
In multiple filings, the government has conceded that it wrongfully removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to a notorious prison for terrorists in El Salvador on March 15. On April 7, accordingly, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered—with no recorded dissents—that the government “facilitate” his return.
But rather than try to right its wrong, the Trump administration has, for weeks, been resisting bringing him back and downplaying the gravity of its error. Both strategies have hinged on the administration’s dubious insistence that Abrego Garcia is a “verified” and “ranking” member of a violent Salvadoran gang, MS-13. It has also argued that he is a “terrorist,” in that, two months ago, Secretary of State Marco Rubio listed M-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) as a “designated foreign terrorist organization.”
Abrego Garcia is currently being held in El Salvador’s Centro del Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, in a different case involving 137 Venezuelans whom the Trump administration sent to CECOT without due process, recently credited evidence that CECOT detainees were “highly likely to face immediate and intentional life-threatening harm at the hands of state actors.”
Abrego Garcia, who has no criminal record in the United States or anywhere else, denies the allegation of gang membership. On March 24, his attorneys filed suit in Greenbelt, Maryland, asking U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to order him returned. He argued, as the government has since admitted, that his removal was illegal because an immigration judge had granted him “withholding of removal” to El Salvador due to his “well-founded fear of future persecution” there from a violent gang known as Barrio 18. His attorneys allege that CECOT houses members of that gang.
This article explores the source of the administration’s claim about Abrego Garcia’s membership in MS-13 and its credibility, both on its face and in the context of the other information known about this individual. [Continue reading…]
The judge presiding over the case of a man who was mistakenly deported by the U.S. government to a prison in El Salvador suggested Tuesday that she was weighing contempt proceedings against the Trump administration.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered administration officials to turn over evidence of their efforts to help bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. since she first ordered them to “facilitate” his return, saying the government had not shown her anything of note on that front.
“I’ve gotten nothing,” Xinis said. “I’ve gotten no real response, and no real legal justification for not answering,” she continued, adding that if the administration is not going to answer her questions “then justify why. That’s what we do in this house.”
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia had asked that the administration be found in contempt of court over its inaction. The judge said she wants to review the evidence the administration submits, which is expected to include sworn depositions, before ruling on the matter.
She ordered officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security to sit for the depositions, and for the administration to hand over documents by the end of the month to see what steps its taken to comply with her order.
In a written order after the hearing, Xinis said that if the administration does not comply with that part of her order, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers “are free to seek separate sanctions on an expedited basis.” [Continue reading…]
In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws.
Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by “legal” what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.
It is that anti-constitutional escapism that enables abuse. State terror involves not just the malignant development of state organs of oppression, such as masked men in black vans, but also the withdrawal of the state from its role as a guardian of law. What aspiring tyrants present as “strength,” the ability to terrorize innocent people, rests on what might be seen as a more fundamental weakness, which is the withdrawal of the state from the principle of the rule of law. When we have law, we are all stronger; when we lack law, everyone is weaker except for the very few who can direct the coercive power of the state against the rest of us. [Continue reading…]