Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had lived and worked in the US for almost half his life, was deported to El Salvador in March by the US government. Little did he know that US President Donald Trump’s sinisterly exuberant and widespread deportation campaign would soon introduce him.
Abrego Garcia, who is the parents’ five-year-old autistic son, was detained while driving in Maryland with Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who is also a citizen of the US, and has since reportedly experienced severe trauma as a result. Vasquez Sura claimed in a later court affidavit that her son, who is unable to speak, had been “very distressed” by his father’s “sustained disappearance,” crying more than usual, and “finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent.”
Of course, in everyone’s favorite “land of the free,” tearing families apart and causing traumatized children has long been par for the bipartisan course, but Trump has undoubtedly produced more of a sensational spectacle than his Democratic foes, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. In the name of national security, after all, there is nothing like planting a lot of anxiety and psychological trauma, right?
More than 200 other people, including Abrego Garcia, were deported to El Salvador in addition to the Trump administration’s most recent experiments with a sadistic counterimmigration policy. The notorious mega-prison built by Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s self-described “coolest dictator in the world,” the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), was quickly housed the deportees. The facility has tens of thousands of people who have been detained as a result of the “state of emergency” that was declared in 2022, and it has no signs of abating.
More than 85% of the country’s population, or more than 1% of the country’s population, have been imprisoned under the pretense of fighting gangs in an array of jails that frequently serve as black holes for the indefinitely disappearing human beings as well as any notion of human and legal rights. There is even less of a rush to put an end to the “emergency” now that US funding, deportations, and inbound money have increased El Salvador’s international carceral clout and Bukele’s tough-guy image.
In addition, Trump and Bukele have had a greater opportunity to showcase their shared fervor for sociopathy and disdain for the law as a result of the particular case of Abrego Garcia. Due to the dangers that such a move would entail for his life, Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador happened in direct violation of a US immigration judge’s 2019 ruling, which stated that he could not be deported to his home country.
Indeed, Abrego Garcia fled to the United States as a teenager out of fear for his life as a result of family threats from gangs. The Trump-Bukele team is still determined not to correct the fact that his deportation in March was quickly caused by an administrative error.
After all, this would set a dangerous precedent by implying that asylum seekers in the US shouldn’t have to endure a “administrative error”-caused spontaneous disappearance to El Salvador and that there is a possibility of recourse to justice.
According to a recent New York Times article that details the Trump administration’s debate over how to handle the PR side of the Abrego Garcia blunder before it became public, US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials “discussed trying to portray Mr. Abrego Garcia as a “leader” of the violent street gang MS-13, even though they could not find any supporting evidence.”
But a lack of evidence has never stopped those who don’t care about the first things that are true. The president has unapologetically referred to a doctored photograph of the man’s knuckles, while Trump officials have continued to insist on Abrego Garcia’s affiliation with MS-13. The police department in Prince George’s County, Maryland, made a significant contribution to the administration’s decision to classify Abrego Garcia as a gang member because, among other oh-so-incriminating behaviors, he was also wearing a Chicago Bulls hat in 2019.
Given the US basketball team’s enormous domestic and international fanbase, it would be absurd to use Chicago Bulls merchandise as alleged proof of gang membership, if, in reality, such preposterous profiling tendencies did not directly lead to physical and psychological misery for Abrego Garcia and countless other people.
The US Supreme Court issued an order in April to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the country. The administration has gone to ridiculous lengths to defy a separate order from US District Judge Paula Xinis that requests details on what it is doing to secure Abrego Garcia’s release in addition to failing to so far.
According to DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, the Trump administration officials then chose the good old “state secrets” excuse, which would allow the withholding of information regarding Abrego Garcia’s case in order to safeguard “national security” and the “safety of the American people.”
Bukele, on the other hand, has handled the Abrego Garcia situation with a petulant and vengeful machismo appropriate for the “coolest dictator” of the world, ridiculing the wronged and imprisoned man in X. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Bukele made it clear to reporters during an April, visit, and in person visit to his partner in crime in the Oval Office in Washington.
In El Salvador, where the civil war of 1979-1992 claimed the lives of more than 75, 000 people, it is worth noting that long before the “state of emergency” there is now, the US had a sizable hand in supporting right-wing state terror.
Numerous Salvadorans emigrated north to the US, where MS-13 and other gangs formed as a form of collective self-defense, and the majority of wartime atrocities were committed by the US-backed Salvadoran military and allied death squads. The US began deporting gang members in large numbers to a newly devastated nation after the war’s conclusion, easing the way for more hostility, migration, and deportation, leading to, of course, the most infamous dictatorship in the world.
Nothing, as they say, aids in the consolidation of power and the evisceration of rights more than a strong “terrorist” enemy, and at the moment, Abrego Garcia is the liar who serves as one of two sociopathic heads of state as that enemy. Abrego Garcia isn’t Osama bin Laden; he’s just a random man whose calculated torment is intended as a warning to anyone who might be overly confident in the rule of law, in the end.
Trump has already proposed and sent US citizens to El Salvador for incarceration, along with every trace of legality. The president has suggested that Bukele construct more prisons, a task that presumably won’t require a lot of arm-twisting.
No one is safe as the US government attempts to systematically annihilate both the rights of legal citizens and foreign nationals.
