Abrego Garcia is a fake gangster. Trump and Bukele are not.
Trump's filthy deal with El Salvador is an indictment of him, not the deportees.
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On April 14, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele sat in the Oval Office for a press conference with President Trump and several members of his cabinet.
“Mr. President Bukele, we thank you very much for your partnership. It has been wonderful for us to be able to have somewhere to send the worst of the worst and someone to partner with,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gushed over the arrangement to rendition immigrants to Bukele’s CECOT gulag.
Bukele was similarly effusive: “We're very happy and we're very eager to help. We know that you have a crime problem, a terrorism problem that you need help with, and we're a small country, but if we can help, we will do it.”
The two leaders lavished praise on each other for their heroic efforts to fight the criminal gang MS-13 and “save” their respective nations.
“Mr. President, you have 350 million people to liberate,” Bukele went on. “But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That's the way it works, right?”
It was a bizarre display, since the US government only secured Bukele’s cooperation by agreeing to drop prosecutions of multiple high-ranking members of the MS-13 gang, paving the way for them to be sent back to El Salvador. A spokeswoman for Bukele framed this as “a matter of honor.” But in fact Bukele was desperate to hide evidence that he’d made multiple deals with MS-13, trading better treatment in prisons for reductions in violence and political support for his Neuva Ideas party.
Last month, ProPublica reported on Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multi-agency operation working since 2019 to dismantle MS-13 which “found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced US charges that include ordering the murders of US citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.”
An indictment filed in December 2020 against 14 members of the gang alleged that the Bukele government actively worked to evade US extradition requests for members of the gang.
This week, the New York Times reported on the unraveling investigation:
Indeed, when the United States originally asked El Salvador to extradite Mr. Canales, “high-level Salvadoran officials” set the gang leader up in a luxury apartment, gave him a firearm and then, prosecutors said, made arrangements to get him out of the country. He remained a fugitive until he was caught by Mexican authorities and placed in American custody in November 2023.
As the Vulcan team pursued its second case, investigators found evidence that it was not just a “few bad apples” in the Bukele administration working with MS-13. There were ties to the gang at “the highest level of government,” one former official with knowledge of the inquiry said.
And yet in the weeks leading up to the Oval Office meeting, the government quietly dropped cases against multiple MS-13 defendants they worked for years to build cases against.
“The United States has determined that sensitive and important foreign policy considerations outweigh the government’s interest in pursuing the prosecution of the defendant, under the totality of the circumstances, and therefore require dismissal of the case,” prosecutor John J. Durham (son of the former special counsel) wrote to Judge Joan Azrack.
Trump constantly calls immigrant gang members an existential threat to America. He even based his March 15 Alien Enemies Act proclamation on the demonstrably false claim that the US is being invaded by members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, who are working as proxies of that country’s government.
And yet a month later, he was mugging in the Oval Office with a leader whose entire regime is in bed with MS-13.
The man in the middle
Trapped at the center of this controversy is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a construction worker in Maryland who was minding his own business on March 12, picking his son up from his grandmother’s house, when Department of Homeland Security agents pulled over his car and told him his “status had changed.”
After waiting for his wife to come retrieve their child — she says agents told her she had 10 minutes to get there or they’d turn the boy over to child protective services — Abrego began his dystopian journey through several prisons and at least two countries.
To call it Kafkaesque is to reduce it to a tale of bureaucratic absurdity, rather than a maelstrom of lies concocted to cover up a terrible policy. Like the dirty deal with Bukele, Abrego’s ordeal reveals a government wholly unconcerned with rooting out gangs or protecting the public. Its only goal is to deport as many people as fast as possible — and it doesn’t care how many lies it has to tell to make it happen.
ICE was never going to meet Stephen Miller’s arbitrary quota of 3,000 bodies a day by arresting criminals, particularly since immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than US citizens. And so the government has doggedly pretended that every day laborer they scoop up outside Home Depot is an MS-13 kingpin, even if all they have to go on is a “Jump Man” tattoo or a Chicago Bulls hoodie. ICE is also grabbing up every immigrant released into the community for the past 50 years, since they happen to be the easiest to find.
Which is more or less what happened to Abrego.
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In 2019, he and a group of men were picked up outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, and Abrego was flagged as a member of MS-13 based on his Bulls hat. Later that year an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal to his native El Salvador based on his credible fear of being persecuted there, and Abrego appears to have led a basically normal life until agents swept him up this year to feed into the insatiable maw of Trump’s deportation machine.
But when you’re racing to shovel human beings out the door, mistakes get made. And so Abrego was on one of the three flights that left Texas on March 15 headed for Bukele’s rent-a-prison in the only country on earth where the US could not send him.
Lies upon lies
The administration insists that the 238 men they consigned to the Salvadoran hellhole are “the worst of the worst.” This is yet another lie, and yet when it emerged that Abrego was on the plane, the administration briefly told the truth.
“Through administrative error, Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador,” ICE Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna told Maryland federal Judge Paula Xinis on March 31. “This was an oversight.”
But soon enough, the administration changed its tune, with White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt calling Abrego a human trafficker who would never come back to America.
Trump held up an obviously doctored image of Abrego’s hand with “MS-13” tattooed on it and went berserk when journalist Terry Moran pointed out that it was fake.
Over at the Justice Department, anyone unwilling to go along with the lie was sidelined. Longtime immigration lawyer Erez Reuveni refused to repeat the unsubstantiated claim in court documents, along with the legally unsupported argument that Abrego’s membership in MS-13 nullified the immigration judge’s order barring his removal to El Salvador.
“I didn’t sign up to lie,” Reuveni complained to his supervisor August Flentje, who countered that he “signed up for the responsibility to do so when he accepted the Deputy position.” The next morning, they were both fired.
But there were others at the DOJ willing to pick up the slack. Drew Ensign, deputy assistant attorney general for immigration litigation at DOJ, insisted that the Trump administration could not possibly get Abrego back from El Salvador, even as Trump himself acknowledged that he could accomplish it with one phone call.
Solicitor General John Sauer went so far as to suggest to the Supreme Court that El Salvador, a country Abrego fled when he was 16, “may have its own compelling reasons to detain him.”
And Bukele was happy to play along when asked in the Oval Office if he would return Abrego to the United States.
“How can I smuggle the terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States,” he smirked.
But even as the government was claiming in court that it could not possibly facilitate Abrego’s return to the US, the administration was secretly concocting a scheme to bring him back and charge him with human smuggling.
Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime
On May 21, the government announced that Abrego was returning to America to be indicted in Tennessee for unlawfully transporting undocumented immigrants. It alleged that Abrego earned $100,000 a year driving undocumented immigrants from Texas to Maryland, in what they described as a criminal MS-13 enterprise.
The government’s case centers on a traffic stop in November 2022 in Putnam County, Tennessee, where Abrego was pulled over driving a Chevy Suburban full of men with no luggage or IDs. Abrego’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, concedes that he occasionally drove people between work sites, but disputes that he was part of a people smuggling conspiracy. The apparent smoking gun is that Abrego and some of his passengers claimed to have come from a job in St. Louis, while others said they’d come from Texas.
The officers on the scene seemed to have been unbothered by this disparity: “They stopped in St. Louis, but they were definitely in Houston, Texas,” one said on the body camera footage. No one was charged, however, and the men were soon on their way.
But the government pins its entire case on the encounter, noting that license plate readers picked up the Suburban in Houston that week, but not in St. Louis for a whole year before. It does not explain why these supposedly all-seeing license plate readers can’t find any of the hundred other trips they allege Abrego made as part of this alleged conspiracy.
The indictment suffers from additional deficiencies. For instance, it alleges that Abrego was driving 1,500 miles roundtrip from Maryland to Houston multiple times a week at the same time he was holding down a full-time construction job. The case is also highly dependent on the testimony of co-conspirators with documented criminal histories. One is a twice-convicted felon who has been deported from the US five times. Another was previously convicted of human trafficking and deported. These two men are blood relatives, and a third female cooperating witness is in a romantic relationship with one of them.
The government is now granting these admitted criminals residency and work permits in exchange for their testimony against someone with no criminal record — which is certainly of a piece with its deal with Bukele!
Meanwhile in court …
The government first argued that Abrego should be detained pending trial in Tennessee. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes rejected their motion, finding that the DOJ had failed to establish any of the factors that would militate for pretrial detention, including harm to a minor child, danger to witnesses, and risk of flight.
The last of those was particularly ridiculous since the DOJ represented to the court that DHS would immediately take Abrego into custody and deport him should the court release him pending trial. Indeed, it made the wholly dubious argument that the DOJ would be powerless to stop DHS from deporting him once he was in their custody, and thus the court should not grant bail.
And the DOJ represented to Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland that DHS would immediately deport Abrego to a third country — not El Salvador — as soon as he was back in DHS custody. (Judge Xinis retains jurisdiction over the original habeas case filed by Abrego’s wife when he was deported, and Abrego has asked the judge to order his return to Maryland.)
“This is fake news,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson tweeted indignantly, insisting that “he will face the full force of the American justice system — including serving time in American prison for the crimes he’s committed.”
Once again the government told one story in court and another in public.
Threatened with being renditioned to God knows where in the system of global gulags Trump is assembling the moment he stepped out of the courthouse, Abrego’s lawyers raced back to the courthouse in Tennessee and reversed his motion for release. On June 30, the magistrate granted his request and let Abrego stay in jail pending trial.
Who’s the gangster here?
Abrego is just one man. But like Bukele, his saga illustrates the depths the Trump administration will go to in an effort to defend their indefensible immigration policy.
Perhaps the government should examine its own filings, though. Because so much of its evidence against Abrego and the men it casts into these gulags is based on association. In the DOJ’s bail memo, it insists that if you keep company with gangsters, you yourself are likely a gangster. And if these gangsters show you deference, then it means you’re kingpin.
In substance, unless the defendant had status in the gang, the MS-13 gang members arrested with the defendant would not have allowed the defendant to represent MS-13 in their presence – with his clothing and hat representing the gang and selling drugs – without severe consequences.
Nayyib Bukele not only associates with gangsters, but owes his position to them. And if Bukele is falling all over himself to show deference to Trump, that’s pretty good evidence that the man in the White House is a gangster, too. Maybe even the kingpin.
That’s it for today
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And all with the tacit approval of SCOTUS … who still avoids considering the illegality and unconstitutionality of Trump—he personally gets a free pass each time.
All of this while Trump pardoned the J6 criminals, and has been pardoning and/or commuting sentences of other convicted criminals. But, in Trump's defense, all of these people are white (this is sarcasm).