Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Homecoming

Last Friday, the Trump administration made a big announcement: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, would be returned to the United States. The twist, because nothing unequivocally good can ever happen under Trump, is that he’s being returned to stand trial: the Department of Justice has accused him of smuggling migrants from Texas into the interior of the country.

The administration’s actions here are a complete inversion of the narrative they’ve been selling. Trump claims that he’s deporting criminals, but Abrego Garcia was deported when the administration had no knowledge of a crime. Now that they’ve ostensibly found one, they’re bringing him back to the United States. This is very literally the opposite of what they say they’re doing.

What’s actually happening here is obvious: the administration is trying to save face. Following the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return, they’ve been under increasing pressure by courts to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States. Suspicious of their stonewalling, a federal judge recently launched a probe into the administration’s efforts. The same judge is about to hear a motion to sanction the administration for their conduct in the case.

Rather than risk losing in a confrontation with the courts, the administration is trying to have it both ways: return him to the United States, but while being as vindictive as possible. More importantly, they don’t want to concede that they’ve made a real mistake. They’ve admitted to courts that Abrego Garcia was deported by accident, but they’ve never conceded that it was a mistake in the colloquial sense, always publicly insisting that Abrego Garcia is a gang-affiliated miscreant. If they can show through this prosecution that Abrego Garcia is, in fact, a bad guy, they will use it to argue that the entire mass deportation project is vindicated.

How strong is the case against Abrego Garcia?

That the charges against Abrego Garcia are trumped up bullshit is basically a given considering the administration’s actions to this point, but here are some reasons to be skeptical:

1. We don’t know what went on behind the scenes of the indictment, but we do know that whatever it was caused Ben Schrader, head of the criminal division for the Middle District of Tennessee (where the charges were filed), to resign in protest.

2. The indictment itself is pretty thin. It tells the story of a decade-long conspiracy to smuggle undocumented migrants through the country. But of the 32 paragraphs in the indictment, only one is grounded in a verifiable fact: Paragraph 30, which details a November 2022 traffic stop wherein Abrego Garcia was pulled over driving nine men in a Chevy Suburban. He allegedly claimed he was driving them back from a job in Missouri, but no equipment or luggage was in the car, the car had not been to Missouri, and he had $1400 in cash on him. Suspicious! But Abrego Garcia wasn’t charged – or even ticketed – at the time, and the only way you get from here to a decade-long conspiracy is through the testimony of several informants who almost certainly provided that testimony in exchange for not being sent to CECOT themselves.

3. All else aside, it would be a pretty big coincidence for the man who’s been the symbolic flashpoint of the political fight over Trump’s deportation scheme to have been part of an elaborate migrant-smuggling conspiracy all along. We all knew the administration would go fishing for charges to throw his way, but the end result feels a little too perfect. This is sort of like a known thief showing up with a bag full of cash and saying he found it on the side of the road. It could be true, sure, but you’d have to be a sucker to take him for his word.

Regardless, the truth of the allegations is less important than the fact that they exist. One of the state’s most important sources of power is its ability to decide who gets prosecuted and who doesn’t. The Trump administration investigated Abrego Garcia entirely for their own political advantage. The indictment, no matter how sound, is the fruit of that poisonous tree. It is the product of political and moral corruption. 

And of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Abrego Garcia is guilty of this crime or any other. Sending someone to a foreign gulag does not become acceptable if you find out later that they committed a crime. The injustice has already been done, the Constitution has already been violated. All that’s left is legal technicality and political theater.

Where are the Democrats?

One of the most heartening developments of the last few months was when several Democrats, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, traveled to El Salvador to visit Abrego Garcia and shine a spotlight on his treatment. 

One of the most disheartening moments of the last few months was when it was subsequently reported that many Democrats felt the party was focusing too much on Abrego Garcia. Senator Amy Klobuchar said that the Trump administration “picked out this case and this man because it’s about a subject that they want to keep in the news,” and that the issue was being used to “distract people” from the economy. (Note that this makes no sense – the Abrego Garcia case was in the news because his legal challenges made headlines, not because the administration placed it there). California Governor Gavin Newsom, set on his path to finish fourth in Iowa in 2028, took the same line.

The concern was that immigration has historically been a political strength for Trump. Discussing the issue, therefore, would only hurt Democrats. But as I’ve written before, that’s not how politics works. Public opinion isn’t set in stone - people take policy cues from political elites. The pollster G. Elliott Morris recently published data showing that as news coverage of Abrego Garcia’s situation peaked, Trump’s polling on immigration tanked. As Democrats (and the media) started to ignore the story, Trump’s numbers steadily recovered. Abrego Garcia’s story, in other words, was a clear political winner for Dems, but they shied away from it, looking to change the subject to tariffs.

They didn’t abandon Abrego Garcia in a Salvadoran gulag just because they’re politically inept, though that’s part of it. They didn’t do it because they’re morally vacuous, though that’s part of it, too. They did it because they feared this moment, when the administration might find some evidence that Abrego Garcia committed a crime. or held some unpopular views, or otherwise revealed himself to be less than a flawless human being.

But there are no perfect victims. No matter which unjustly deported person becomes the symbolic face of Trump’s brutality, the administration will be able to dig up enough dirt to cloud the issue. Not many people are going to hold up well under the microscope of a federal investigation designed to smear them. If Democrats are only willing to go to bat for someone who does, they’ll still be waiting while Trump’s machinery tears through the rest of us.