In the Oval Office Monday, Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele and wannabe American strongman Donald Trump sat together and, among other things, explained why Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García, sent illegally to Bukele’s CECOT mega-prison at Trump’s behest.
The leaders laughed at the suggestion that they should comply with a court order to facilitate Abrego Garcías return, with Bukele saying the demand was “preposterous” because he couldn’t smuggle the man in, even as Trump’s people said the impediment was that he was in Bukele’s custody. Both can’t be true.
For two men who go to great lengths to make themselves seem all-powerful for their domestic audiences, they each seem adamant that they are powerless to comply with the court’s very simple ruling, which they treat as extraordinarily complex when it really just amounts to a few steps: the U.S. government, which is paying for and directed Abrego Garcías detention, directs Bukele’s forces to release him; they do; Abrego García is provided transport back and allowed in via humanitarian parole. What is preposterous is not the question of whether and how the Maryland union man will be brought home, but both parties’ insistence here that they can’t make that happen.
What they really mean is that they won’t. If the government’s admission in federal court that they had illegally deported Abrego García despite his legal protections was a rare moment when it publicly admitted that it was circumventing due process with these renditions to CECOT, they now seem to be stepping away from admitting that they are at fault or indeed even could be at fault. In a declaration from an ICE official filed Sunday to the court, the government tries to give itself the power to effectively retroactively strip his protections away based on their contention that he is a member of MS-13, which they have yet to provide any concrete evidence for.
The administration wants to distract you by painting all these folks as monsters — Bukele, in the Oval Office, went so far as to call Abrego García a “terrorist” — and then framing the push for due process as coddling monsters, even though the whole point of due process is that it is an opportunity to determine who’s guilty and who isn’t, and dole out reasonable repercussions. Even in cases where someone might have been legitimately involved in gang activity, nothing in the law gives the federal government the power to ship people off to a foreign prison from which they allegedly can’t get them back.
It is horrible that this is happening to anyone, but we’ll remind readers that Trump administration leaders have explicitly and enthusiastically endorsed the idea that U.S. citizens could be sent to El Salvador as well. That means that, at various times and in different ways, Trump and his administration have admitted that they are not being particularly diligent about who they’re sending and on what evidence; that they will send citizens; and that they have no power to get folks back even when they’ve acknowledged that they were sent illegally. You should think about what that might mean for you. The Supreme Court, which already sided with a lower court that had directed the government to bring him back, must put a stop to this madness before it can go any further.
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