UPDATE: OK, OK, we'll have a silly trial. Happy now?
Abrego Garcia is back in the United States and facing charges under a new indictment
By Sam Bellamy
“This is what American justice looks like.”
So said Attorney General Pam Bondi this afternoon as she announced that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been returned to the United States from El Salvador to stand trial on charges of human smuggling.
Only in the bizarro world of MAGA can the word “justice” be used to describe deporting a person in defiance of a judge’s 2019 order and then letting him languish for months in a brutal Salvadoran prison in defiance of repeated court orders and even a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling (see below) that he be brought home.
In the quaint days of yore, i.e., last year, people in this country were sent to prison only after being charged with a crime, given a chance to defend themselves in court and — critically — found guilty. This is ordinarily not the sort of thing the government tries to develop a better mousetrap for, but of course, this is the first time we’ve had so many feral cats minding the trap.
In another Trumpian touch, Bondi took a few moments to thank El Salvador’s self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” Nayib Bukele, for kindly agreeing to return one of hundreds of humans he is storing for the United States at a tidy profit. Most of those prisoners, despite the Trump administration’s claims, have no criminal record.
Abrego Garcia was returned, Bondi and Deputy AG Todd Blanche explained, because he was indicted by a grand jury last month in Tennessee on two felony counts — one for “conspiracy to transport aliens” and the other for “unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.”
When asked by a reporter if Abrego Garcia’s return fulfills those court orders from months ago, Blanche essentially shrugged a whatever.
The allegations, stemming from a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022 that led to no arrest, are based on testimony by unnamed co-conspirators that Abrego Garcia was part of a smuggling ring that brought people into the United States illegally from Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador and elsewhere through Mexico into Texas.
“He was a smuggler of humans and children and women,” said Bondi, presumably borrowing that odd classification system from Andrew Tate and the manosphere.
Among the people smuggled in, according to the indictment, were members of the MS-13 gang. Bondi said grand jurors determined that he had made more than 100 trips, bringing thousands of people to the United States illegally.
That’s what he’s officially charged with, but Bondi detailed other allegations she said were made by co-conspirators, including that he abused immigrant women, solicited nude photos of a child, played a role in a murder and smuggled firearms and narcotics into the country. No charges have been filed related to those allegations.
Early in the press conference, Bondi said Abrego Garcia would be returned to El Salvador after the trial but later allowed that he would be returned if found guilty.
Given all that’s transpired so far, one might be forgiven for thinking all of this smacks a bit of the Stalin secret police credo, “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
Did the Trump administration trump up charges to make this case — and Abrego Garcia — go away? Sadly, we can’t rule that out.
When a reporter asked when the investigation into Abrego Garcia’s alleged crimes began, Bondi dodged the question by saying it had been ongoing.
Since 2022? Well, could be. From the administration’s viewpoint, pretty much no one in government was doing anything until Jan. 20 of this year.
Despite what Fox News hosts and MAGA viewers claim, critics of Abrego Garcia hasty and illegal deportation have not portrayed him as a man worthy of sainthood or concluded that it’s impossible he was guilty of the MS-13 ties that administration alleges.
The problem was that the administration never offered proof beyond a photoshopped image of tattoos on the man’s hand, and more importantly, the administration had never tried to prove its allegations in court.
The objections to Abrego Garcia’s deportation have always been centered on the fact it wasn’t in accordance with our Constitution. That violation was compounded by his incarceration in a Salvadoran prison that is nowhere close to meeting U.S. Bureau of Prisons standards.
Yes, belatedly, we are seeing American justice at work — assuming these charges haven’t cooked up and the guy now gets a fair trial.
So far, though, we’ve witnessed only the acts of a presidential administration that operates on a toxic mix of incompetence and boundless malevolence.
Bondi and crew can pat themselves on the backs all they’d like about this indictment, but their lawlessness to this point will not be forgotten.
The following piece by Mike Sorrell, headlined “Yet another test of the Constitution/Supreme Court says to go get Abrego-Garcia; Trump administration delays again,” appeared April 11 at Fight the Fire.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday decided on a 9-0 vote that the Trump administration should bring home Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, a 29-year-old man seized and transported to a prison in El Salvador by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials due to an “administrative error.”
That moved the case back to U.S. District Court in Maryland, where a hearing was held this afternoon.
Before the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis had told Justice Department lawyers to inform her by this afternoon what the Trump administration planned to do to follow through on her order to return Abrego Garcia to the United States.
Justice Department lawyers told Xinis they are not ready to answer her question.
“Defendants are unable to provide the information requested by the court on the impracticable deadline set by the court hours after the Supreme Court issued its order,” Justice Department lawyers said in a statement to Xinis.
“In light of the insufficient amount of time afforded to review the Supreme Court order,” the lawyers went on, “defendants are not in a position where they ‘can’ share any information requested by the court. That is the reality.”
Xinis, perturbed, told the Justice Department to provide daily updates to her. She said court would resume Tuesday.
The New York Times reported, “The administration’s refusal to comply with Judge Xinis’s directives put it on a collision course with the judge and threatened to erupt into a showdown between the executive and judicial branches.”
In their 9-0 vote, the justices told the Trump administration to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of Abrego-Garcia.
The court’s directive to the Trump administration was a surprising bit of good news. Trump almost always gets what he wants when cases go before the Supreme Court, but this time every justice seems, in varying degrees perhaps, to have come down on the side of compassion, human decency and the rule of law. American values were upheld by the court, not Trump’s unlawful behavior.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayer said in a statement, “To this day, the government has cited no basis in law for Abrego-Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”
Abrego-Garcia has committed no crime. He is a man with a wife, a 5-year-old son and two stepchildren, all of whom are American citizens. Homeland Security says he is a member of the violent MS-13 gang, but the agency has provided no evidence in court. On March 15, he was taken with three planeloads of alleged gang members to El Salvador, where the federal government paid $6 million to incarcerate them. Abrego-Garcia’s family members say he is not a gang member. They have not heard from him since he was taken to prison.
The Justice Department has said in court it cannot get Abrego-Garcia back.
Nevertheless, Judge Xinis said that he could be brought home and that she wanted to know the timetable on which the Trump administration expected that to happen.
The predictable foot-dragging by Trump through the legal system means Abrego-Garcia will remain in prison for the foreseeable future, and perhaps for the rest of his life, if the administration does not comply with what the courts want done.
“America has reached a very dangerous moment, as the Supreme Court’s indulgence of President Donald Trump’s belief in his own untrammeled authority collides with the justices’ expectation that he will abide by their decisions,” The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote last night.
“If Trump defies the Court here, then America will have taken an important step toward authoritarianism and anti-constitutional government. The stakes of the case may explain the lack of dissent, a clear show of force — the justices have no power in a system in which court orders are optional.”
That would be the constitutional crisis legal experts have said will happen if Trump thinks he can overrule the judicial branch of government.
“The only argument the Government offers in support of its request, that United States courts cannot grant relief once a deportee crosses the border, is plainly wrong,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan agreed with her.
“The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
Trump has talked about possibly taking American citizens to foreign prisons. That is frightening to contemplate.
There is an easier way to defuse Abrego-Garcia’s situation than make a national case of it, one of his lawyers said on MSNBC Friday morning. Simon Sandoval Moshenberg said that, rather than debate his client’s fate over abstract issues of law, the government should see “the human issue” at stake and simply go down to El Salvador and get him back.
Appeals to Trump’s humanity aren’t likely to get very far.