In March, the US government was deported to El Salvador, 29-year-old Kilmer Abrego Garcia. Little did he know that he would soon become the face of President Donald Trump’s evil, enthusiastic mass expulsion campaign.
Abrego Garcia, who married US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sula, was taken into custody while driving in Maryland with the couple’s five-year-old autistic son. In a subsequent court affidavit, Vazquez Sula said that his son, who cannot speak, is “very painful” by his father’s sudden loss of, crying more than usual, finding and smelling Kilmer’s work shirt, smelling Kilmer’s familiar scent.”
Of course, children who tore their families and traumatize their children have long been a par on the bipartisan course of everyone’s favorite “Land of the Free.” Anyway, you don’t leap a lot of fear and psychological trauma in the name of national security, right?
Abrego Garcia, along with over 200 other people, was deported to El Salvador, sharing the honor of serving as a demonized guinea pig in the Trump administration’s current experiments in sadistic immigration policy. Denner was quickly detained at the Centre for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), an infamous mega prison built by Salvador’s self-descriptive “the coolest dictator in the world” Naive Buquere. The facility is home to thousands of people declared in 2022 and arrested under a nationwide “state of emergency” that showed no signs of decline.
Pretending to fight a war with the gang, Bukel imprisoned more than 85,000 Salvadorans (over 1% of the country’s population). And now, new US funds and deportation have boosted El Salvador’s international Kalsal influence and Bukere’s harsh image of Guys, so there are even fewer rushes to end the “emergency.”
Meanwhile, the case of Abrego Garcia in particular provided both Trump and Buquere with a long opportunity to show mutual passion for social disability and a sloppy to the law. When that happened, Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador occurred in a direct violation of a 2019 ruling by a US immigration judge.
Certainly, Abrego Garcia fled to the United States as a teenager. And while the US government was quickly forced to admit that his deportation in March occurred “due to administrative errors,” Trump Buquere’s team is determined not to fix it.
Ultimately, this would be a dangerous precedent in suggesting that there is indeed a possibility of relying on justice and that asylum seekers in the United States do not need to live in fear that has naturally disappeared due to “administrative errors.”
According to a recent New York Times article, before publishing details of the Trump administration’s debate on how to manage the PR side of Abrego Garcia’s failure, a US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official said, “By attempting to portray Abrego Garcia as a ‘leader’, they are trying to portray the MS-13 ‘leader’ in the violent streets.
However, the lack of evidence has never stopped people who are not interested in fact or reality in the first place. Trump officials continue to insist on the partnership between Abrego Garcia and MS-13, but the president himself has stunnedly evoked a picture of a man’s finger knuckle diagnosed with a tattoo. The administration also relies heavily on the fact that in 2019 the Prince George County, Maryland, police department determined that Abrego Garcia was a gang member because he was wearing a Chicago bull hat.
Certainly, the frequency with which US law enforcement attire cites Chicago Bulls products as evidence of suspected gang membership is hilarious given the large domestic and international fan base of US basketball teams.
In April, the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “promote” Abrego Garcia back to the United States. In addition to not following that order so far, the administration went to a slippery length to ignore another order from US District Judge Paula Sinis to provide details on what exactly is being done to secure the release of Abrego Garcia.
Clearly, as plagued by the forcefulness of Judge Sinis, Trump administration officials have gone for the good old “state secret” excuse. This allows for withholding information on the Abrego Garcia case to protect “national security” and “the safety of Americans,” as DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.
Buquere, on his side, took Abrego Garcia’s situation to X to ridicule a man who was unfairly accused of being the “coolest dictator” in the world, with a malicious machismo, and unfairly accused and imprisoned. During an April visit to his crime partner in Washington’s oval office, Buquere revealed to reporters that he had not lifted his fingers on behalf of Abrego Garcia. “How can I smuggle terrorists into the US?”
Speaking of terrorism, remember that long before the current “emergency” in El Salvador, the United States had a major hand in supporting the fears of a right-wing nation in the country that killed more than 75,000 people in the 1979-92 civil war.
Most of the wartime atrocities were committed by US-backed Salvadoranian forces and allied death forces, with countless Salvadorans fleeing to the United States. Following the end of the war, the United States took on the massive deportation of gang members to a newly devastated country, paving the way for continuous violence, migration, deportation and pinnacles in the world’s coolest dictatorship.
As they say, nothing promotes the integration of power and the visceral integration of rights, like the enemy of solid “terrorists.” At this point, Abrego Garcia holds the questionable distinction of serving as the enemy of the head of two socially disabled nations rather than one. But at the end of the day, Abrego Garcia is not Osama bin Laden. He is just a random man, and his calculated suffering is intended as a warning to anyone who may feel confident in the rule of law.
Trump has already proposed sending US citizens to El Salvador for imprisonment. To that end, the president proposed that Bukel build more prisons.
It is now safe to assume that no one is safe to assume that the US government is extinguishing the rights of foreigners and lawful citizens.
The views expressed in this article are the authors themselves and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.