The government still hasn’t answered that basic question. On Friday, the administration refused to honor a judicial order—delivered by a lower court in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling—to provide a response to it.
Which offers an occasion to step back and underscore a deeply unsettling absurdity about this repugnant story that’s gotten lost in all the legal minutiae. It’s this: All along, the administration has had the option of moving to return Abrego Garcia to the United States and then trying again to deport him via conventional legal processes—which, ironically enough, could result in his removal anyway, in a more lawful manner.
Why hasn’t the government taken that simple step? That question is the bigger, darker one underlying this whole saga.
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The government has admitted it knew Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador but that an “administrative error” caused his removal to that country. Yet the administration has refused to return him. So the high court directed the government to tell a district court in Maryland—where he lives and had been detained for removal—what it has done to rectify this “error.”
The Supreme Court did this while partially upholding a ruling by that lower court, which had said the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. The Supreme Court also ordered the lower court to define what specifically the government must do to effectuate that return, and said the government should be prepared to tell the lower court what it is doing to that end.
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So let’s look at the bigger unknown: Why won’t the government return Abrego Garcia to the United States and seek his removal again in a more lawful manner?
The administration claims it is under no obligation to rectify its erroneous deportation of Abrego Garcia to begin with. But its arguments in this regard are exceptionally weak.
First, the administration says it cannot order El Salvador to give him back. But we are paying that country to hold dozens of others as a service to Trump’s propaganda and hate campaign against immigrants—sorry, as a service to the United States—so the government can simply ask El Salvador for his return.
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Finally, to justify leaving Abrego Garcia in a foreign gulag, the Trump administration claims he is a member of the MS-13 gang. But the evidence for this is exceptionally thin. As the lower court has noted, it rests on the claim that a “confidential informant” told police in Maryland (where he was detained in 2019) that he was in the gang, and on his … Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie.
That’s absurd. But here’s the thing: Even if you allow that Abrego Garcia might have been in MS-13, the government still can simply return him, go into an immigration court, and relitigate his initial “withholding of removal” status. Or, alternatively, the government can seek to deport him to a third country, which isn’t precluded by that status.
In short, the choice is not necessarily between (1) leaving him to rot in a foreign prison after sending him there illegally and (2) bringing him back to roam free inside the United States for the rest of his life. Rather, it’s between (1) leaving him to rot in a foreign prison after sending him there illegally and (2) retrying him in the United States and seeking his deportation that way, if the government so chooses.
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When the choice is understood this way, the whole story looks even uglier. And so, the administration’s latest refusal to say what it’s doing to return Abrego Garcia—as the high court directed—constitutes a very dark turn in this tale.
It’s not hard to guess at the administration’s motives here. Bringing Abrego Garcia back to U.S. soil—and then arguing he should again be removed to El Salvador—is a case the administration might lose. Or if the administration sought to remove him to a third country, that would allow Abrego Garcia to challenge that effort.
Either path would unleash an even bigger media spectacle. It would mean more coverage of Abrego Garcia’s marriage to a U.S. citizen and the couple’s autistic child. It would mean more attention to his longtime ties to a local Maryland community—he’s lived there 14 years, after initially entering illegally in 2011—even as the administration redoubled removal efforts.
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It’s likely that these are the real reasons the Trump administration wants to leave Abrego Garcia wasting away in a foreign gulag rather than rectify its own illegal actions. But, hey, maybe that’s all wrong. If so, Trump’s government can demonstrate this whenever it wants to—by bringing him back and trying to remove him again, the lawful way.
(*) This article is against President Trump’s action, but it’s here on AltrightTV to show just how out of balance our judicial system is. Abrego Garcia is a known MS-13 gangbanger!
* Original Article:
https://newrepublic.com/article/193943/trump-kilmar-garcia-maryland-salvador-removal-error