Where Is Kilmar Abrego Garcia? (w/ Update)

trump's ongoing war against legal immigrants - and basically any American who isn't White Rich and/or Male - has taken the darkest turn yet. His street-level bullies among ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are grabbing people who are innocent of any criminal activity - without presenting ANY evidence of wrong-doing in a court of law as required by Writ of Habeas Corpus - and still shipping them overseas to a private-run prison to avoid any accountability to the federal courts back home.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the most clear example of these brazen attacks on our civil rights (via Ben Finlay at AP News):

Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or savory pork.

The entire family, including his parents, two sisters and older brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy ingredients from the grocery store and make deliveries with his brother.

“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.

A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill his older brother Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.

Barrio 18 similarly targeted Abrego Garcia, according to his immigration case. When he was 12, the gang threatened to take him away until his father paid them “all of the money that they wanted.” They still watched him as he walked to and from school.

The family moved 10 minutes away, but the gang threatened to rape and kill Abrego Garcia’s sisters, court records state. The family shut down the business, moved again and eventually sent Abrego Garcia to the U.S...

Abrego Garcia fled to the U.S. illegally around 2011, the year he turned 16, according to documents filed in his immigration case. He joined Cesar, now a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and found work in construction.

About five years later, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, the records say. In 2018, after she learned she was pregnant, he moved in with her and her two children. They lived in Prince George’s County, just outside Washington.

In 2019, Abrego Garcia went to a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested by county police, according to court filings. Detectives asked if he was a gang member. After explaining he wasn’t, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Abrego Garcia later told an immigration judge that he would seek asylum and asked to be released. Vasquez Sura was five months into a high-risk pregnancy.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, alleged that he was a certified gang member based on information that came from a confidential informant used by county police, records state.

According to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in his current case, the criminal informant had alleged that Abrego Garcia belonged to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he has never lived...

Again, our legal system relies too much on "confidential informants" who can't be verified and tend to provide erroneous claims. Just the simple fact that this "informant" put Abrego Garcia with a gang in a completely different state makes no sense and should have been put under stronger scrutiny.

In October 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution, according to his case. He was released, and ICE did not appeal.

Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly while the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his attorneys said in court filings. He joined a union and was employed full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

He and Vasquez Sura were raising three kids, including their 5-year-old son, who has autism, is deaf in one ear and unable to verbally communicate, according to the complaint filed against the Trump administration. They’re also raising a 9-year-old with autism and a 10-year-old with epilepsy.

Everything about Abrego Garcia says he's a family man, raising kids, working a solid job. Nothing here screams "street gang." For whatever he'd done to come into this country, Abrego Garcia was going through the legal motions to stay here on work permit, doing everything by the book.

And still trump's ICE thugs seized him, relying again on those dubious gang claims and immediately shipping him to El Salvador without a hearing, without a judge's say-so, without any of the due process our legal system is supposed to employ.

Abrego Garcia was pulled over March 12 outside an Ikea in Baltimore with his son, according to court records. An agent called Vasquez Sura and said she had 10 minutes to retrieve their son or ICE would request child protective services.

Abrego Garcia called his wife from jail and said authorities pressed him about MS-13, according to court documents. They asked about a photo they had of him playing basketball on a public court, and his family’s visits to a restaurant serving Mexican and Salvadoran food.

“He would repeat the truth again and again — that he was not in a gang,” Vasquez Sura stated in court documents.

In the mad rush under trump's call to deport as many "illegals" and "criminals" they could, ICE was under pressure to round up any suspected "gang members" even when the existing paperwork and judicial rulings said otherwise.

Everything that happened to Abrego Garcia was so outrageous, unethical, and arguably illegal that even ICE officials admitted this was "an administrative error," the legalese spoken to try and avoid liability for any criminal or civil charges aimed their way.

You would think then in a sane respectable legal system that when the officials admit they've made a mistake like this, they would work hard to undo said mistake and return their victims back to their lives. Instead, trump and his DOJ lackeys are mocking any effort to recover Abrego Garcia, basically telling the judges to get bent (via Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico):

The Trump administration insisted Sunday that it has no legal obligation to arrange for the return of a Maryland man illegally deported from the United States, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling last week only requires officials to admit him into the country if he makes it back from a high-security prison in El Salvador.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge that they don’t interpret the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling — that the administration “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release — as obligating the administration to do anything more than adjust his immigration status to admit him if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him...

The DOJ lawyers sadists are claiming this is all on El Salvador now, even though it's trump whose migrant-bashing policies illegally sent an innocent man to that prison, and even though trump is supposed to be a President with vast executive powers. This is pure gaslighting bullshit.

The administration’s position suggests officials do not view the Supreme Court’s order as compelling them to seek Abrego Garcia’s return. The Salvadoran native entered the country illegally around 2011 and had been living in Maryland. The Trump administration has admitted it deported him to El Salvador in violation of a 2019 immigration court order barring his deportation to that country. Though Abrego Garcia was denied asylum, a judge found he could not be sent to his home country because of a legitimate fear of persecution by a local gang.

The administration continued Sunday to flout a Friday order from Judge Xinis to deliver “daily updates” to the court describing its efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Sunday’s update from Evan Katz, the assistant director of removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the administration had “no updates” for the judge. A day earlier, in a similarly threadbare update, the administration turned to Michael Kozak, the State Department’s senior bureau official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who said Abrego Garcia was still alive in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

The administration is also bucking demands from Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that officials detail the arrangement to ship hundreds of foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador. One of the Sunday filings insists those details are classified and could be subject to attorney-client and state secrets privileges...

What this all boils down to is: trump believes he has Absolute Authority as President Sadist-In-Chief - thanks to that Supreme Court ruling that granted presidents vast executive powers without checks or balances - and this is his attempt to bully and break our federal judiciary into utter uselessness against his grand scheme to rule as Dictator For Life.

This is a severe Constitutional Crisis, far greater than anything we've witnessed since Watergate or the desegregation showdowns of the Civil Rights movement. trump - and the sadists serving at his pleasure not to their Oaths of office - refuses to obey legal court orders from the Third Branch of our federal government, daring the judges to cross a line - something like holding Justice Department officials in contempt of their courts - that could trigger terrible retributions from a quisling-esque Republican Congress or trump's own brute squads.

If trump succeeds here - if Judge Xinis or any of the other judges fighting these deportations that are clear violations of our constitutional rights crumples here, if they allow Abrego Garcia and hundreds of others who were accused of criminal behaviors without proof in the courts of law - this would be a green light for trump and his lackeys to escalate their war on the rule of law and start denying our rights to more groups of Americans trump and co. would want broken and/or removed.

You think trump and Stephen Miller and half the Republican leadership will just stop at going after "illegals"? They're trying to get rid of Birthright Citizenship, something that protects ALL of us - Latino, Black, Asian, Native, Women, Gays/Lesbians, Trans, even other Whites - from losing our protections under the Constitution.

That "When they came for..." poem wasn't exaggeration. When the fascist bastards take over a government and start their purges, they'll keep removing anybody they despise/fear/hate until they get their bloodied, ashen, and morally bankrupt Utopia. trump and the Republican wingnuts are not going to stop. They will go after Latinos. They will go after Blacks. They will go after Chinese and Indians and Japanese and other Asians. They will go after people registered to vote Democrat. They will go after women who aren't already beholden to their patriarchy. They will go after anyone who offends their evangelical hate-filled faith.

We are all on that list destined for those privatized prisons, for the elimination of our citizenry, for the end of any rights - to vote, to own property, to fight for good wages, to cherish and share our lives with those we love, to speak out in protest - we've taken for granted the last 200-plus years.

We are all going to end up like Kilmar Abrego Garcia if we don't fight back.

We all need to speak out about where Abrego Garcia is, and why he isn't home with the family that loves and misses him.

Where Is Abrego Garcia?

He's in a hell that a broken, corrupt sadist sent him to. This is all on trump, and that bastard needs to answer for his crimes (again).

Update 4/15: As a helpful guide, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick drew up a diagram to follow regarding Abrego Garcia's situation and the dubious arguments trump and his thugs are using to claim the man guilty without trial.

Reichlin-Melnick btw is a fellow at the American Immigration Council, graduate from Georgetown Law, who comments on immigration policies on social media.