The Real Kilmar Abrego García Story

For weeks, the illegal deportation of Kilmar Abrego García to a horrific, inhuman prison in El Salvador, built specifically to break the will of gang members, seemed like just another of Donald Trump’s arbitrary acts of cruelty. It was not until Trump’s meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on April 14 that the real story emerged.

Abrego García, born in El Salvador, was sent to the United States by his mother at age 16 to escape gang recruitment. He has lived here for almost 14 years, and is a father of three, married to a U.S. citizen. When ICE grabbed him up, he was working as a sheet metal apprentice and had never before been arrested or charged with any crime in either the United States or El Salvador. He was stopped on March 12 while driving to his home in Maryland with his 5-year-old son, who is on the spectrum for autism, then sent to Texas before being deported to El Salvador on March 15.

According to federal officials, a confidential informant tipped them off that Abrego García was a gang member, but they have refused to provide any further details, likely because there are none.

His attorneys pursued the matter and a federal district court judge ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego García’s release, an order that was largely upheld by the Supreme Court.

It should have been an easy matter for our government to request Abrego García’s repatriation, especially since Trump and Bukele have an excellent autocrat-to-autocrat relationship and the administration admitted the detention and deportation of a totally innocent man was an “administrative error.”

But no.

During their meeting on April 14, Bukele announced that he would not send Abrego García back to the United States. “How can I return him to the United States?” he said when questioned about the affair. “I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”

Trump, who had agreed to abide by any court ruling, sat by in Buddha-like contemplation.

So what is really going on here?

When he took office, Trump promised to deport one million immigrants, or more, during his first year in office. He turned his ICE bloodhounds loose to charge into areas where undocumented immigrants were likely to congregate, the agents sometimes taking into custody anyone who spoke Spanish. Many who were here legally, even citizens, were caught up, most but not all subsequently released. Those still held in custody were often flown back to native countries run by leaders sympathetic to Trump or afraid to offend him.

But the numbers of those kicked out of the country did not begin to approach what Trump had promised. He discovered that deporting a million people is not all that easy. Even sweeping them up like a commercial fisherman trawling for shrimp requires personnel, logistics, and a lot of money. He is widely reported as being frustrated with the slow pace, despite encouraging ICE agents to act like storm troopers.

Further complicating the effort is that most of those detained are entitled to a court hearing, although Trump is doing his best to brush aside the legal system, something with which he is all too adept. In addition, the well-publicized use of Guantanamo to house thirty-thousand deportees, gang members all, turned into a boondoggle.

So what to do?

That’s where Abrego García comes in.

Since the government cannot begin to kick out the appropriate numbers, wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper if all those immigrants, even the ones with valid green cards, chose to leave all on their own?

Persuading them to do so would not be easy. Many, if not most, would ordinarily be reluctant to return to their home countries, having fled because of rampant gang violence, extortion, and immediate tangible threats to their homes, their lives, and their children. That is why Abrego García and his older brother César, now an American citizen, were sent here. For others, the money they can make toiling at the thankless jobs native Americans refuse to take on, and can then send home to their families, makes it worth the risk. And, of course, if they leave, they would be returning to same conditions they had risked their lives to flee.

But what if the risk was not just being sent back but instead being incarcerated in hellholes, such as the gang prison in El Salvador? And what if that risk was compounded by the prospect of being sent there although totally innocent of anything more than working hard, paying taxes, raising a family, and trying to be a good American?

In other words, what if the risk of staying in the United States was as bad or worse than the risk of returning? Trump tried the quasi-concentration camp approach during his first term and it was insufficient to prompt enough desperate people to rethink their efforts to come here to suit him.

But the Salvadoran prison? That might just do it. Maybe the daily images of Kilmar Abrego García in a cage with eleven other vicious criminals posted by outraged supporters and those of his grieving wife would serve as reminders to all those roofers, landscapers, produce harvesters, and, yes, American soldiers, that a similar fate awaits them unless they hotfoot out of here?

And so, one can just see Trump and Bukele sitting in the oval office winking and chuckling.

“Just tell them you can’t get him out, Nayib.”

“No problem, Donnie. Anything for a pal.”