Tag: el salvador
Why Pam Bondi Wants To Make Abrego Garcia Disappear

Why Pam Bondi Wants To Make Abrego Garcia Disappear

For the great sin of having been mistakenly transported to El Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has drawn the full wrath of the federal government, which seems determined to do whatever it can to punish and immiserate him.

The story, almost too baroque to believe, begins in bureaucratic error and ends in calculated cruelty. Abrego, a noncitizen who was legally present in the United States pending an immigration proceeding, was wrongfully deported to El Salvador after a series of cascading mistakes by federal authorities.

What followed was not a correction, nor an apology, but a concerted effort by the Department of Justice—led by Florida U.S. Attorney Markenzy Lapointe and spearheaded in the public arena by the ever-theatrical Pam Bondi—to discredit, disparage, and ultimately criminally charge Abrego with puffed-up offenses that now appear to have exaggerated his conduct.

Rather than acknowledge and correct its own injustice, the government went into a defensive crouch, proffering a shifting series of excuses for why Abrego deserved no sympathy. These ranged from:

  • arguing it was impossible to bring him back because he was under the sovereign control of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele;
  • portraying him as a serious terrorist who deserved to be deported (remember the photoshopped tattoos on a man’s fingers that Trump brandished?);
  • asserting they would not permit him back in the country under any circumstance, but would deport him elsewhere;
  • resisting disclosure of their own errors on the grounds that the information consisted of state secrets;
  • and finally, arguing in court that the mistake was minor and non-prejudicial—essentially, no harm, no foul.

All of the arguments were legally dubious, factually suspect, or both. More than that, the Administration brought to bear an unmistakable malice and obstinacy: locked in a dispute of its own making, it was determined to win at all costs.

This is not a case being handled on autopilot by a faceless bureaucracy. It bears the fingerprints of a political machine that—from the President on down—appears eager to punish anyone who embarrasses them, even (and especially) when the embarrassment results from their own misconduct.

Evolved systems of justice do not see criminal prosecutions as no-holds-barred personal battles.

The claim that Abrego hadn’t actually suffered anything legally cognizable, despite being stranded for months in dangerous and unstable conditions in CECOT prison, was particularly cynical. Just this week, Abrego’s lawyers alleged the opposite: that he, along with other prisoners, was beaten and tortured in prison, including being made to kneel overnight and denied bathroom access. This is the high-tech hellhole that the United States has paid El Salvador millions of dollars to house its deportees.

The DOJ, facing increasing legal pressure, did eventually bring Abrego back to the United States—supposedly via the heroic intervention of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But the Administration wasn’t bringing him back to reunite him with his family. Instead, it brought him back in shackles to face criminal charges.

It was a breathtaking inversion: the man wrongly deported by the government becomes the defendant in a case brought by that same government. The obvious theatrics were designed to pull victory from the jaws of defeat, to assert that the Administration had been right all along, and that Abrego is in fact among the “worst of the worst.”

At the center of this prosecutorial contortion is Attorney General Pam Bondi, playing her familiar Trump-era role: serving as both legal mouthpiece and media surrogate for Trump’s personal priorities. Bondi repeatedly attacked Abrego’s character in public and painted him as a dangerous criminal—straying far outside the four corners of the indictment and putting on a clinic of ethical violations.

The indictment that the feds returned before bringing Abrego back took an already known episode—in which state police did not charge him—and bulked it up with a conspiracy charge painting Abrego as a criminal mastermind.

To support that narrative, they secured the cooperation of the actual head of the operation by granting him a sweetheart deal that let him remain in the U.S. despite a long record of federal crimes, many involving immigration. The conspiracy Abrego is charged with began in 2009 even though the cooperator told them he didn’t meet Abrego until 2015. He also said Abrego had driven for him “on multiple occasions,” which hardly sounds like the level of culpability of a co-conspirator.

The use of that cooperating defendant to get at Abrego violated what used to be DOJ policy of not “cooperating down,” i.e., not using a more culpable defendant to get at a less culpable one. But whatever shreds of DOJ norms remain gave ground to the overriding imperative of winning the battle against Abrego.

Then, matters took a surprising turn.

The government moved to detain Abrego pretrial. The judge denied the motion, holding that the prosecutors couldn’t show that he posed any flight risk or threat to the community, and ordered him released.

DOJ promptly played perhaps its nastiest card: it told the court that as soon as Abrego was released, it would seize him and deport him to a third country.

So much for Bondi’s preening lecture about the need to convict Abrego and have him serve a federal sentence before deportation. Now, just as Abrego was able to consider the prospect of freedom for the first time since he was unlawfully seized and sent to El Salvador, the DOJ’s plan is to forgo the criminal trial and deport him immediately.

This prompted Abrego’s lawyers to take an almost unheard-of step that underscores just how Kafkaesque this case has become. They asked the court to keep him in custody—at least until the government could guarantee it wouldn’t deport him immediately upon release.

His fear was simple and chilling: that once outside the courthouse walls, ICE would swoop in and vanish him before he ever had a chance to mount a defense or tell his story.

That’s where matters now stand. The judge has agreed to keep Abrego in jail—separated from his family, but also from the clutches of ICE agents—while it hears his argument that he is entitled to stand trial and therefore must not be deported.

The government has consented to temporarily halting deportation—it doesn’t have much choice while Abrego remains behind bars. But his legal claim that the government can be forced to put him through a criminal trial rather than deport him is a steep uphill climb.

And that means that once his emergency motion runs its course, Abrego will likely again find himself on a plane—this time bound for some third-party country like South Sudan.

Apart from the puerile obstinacy of beating Abrego—of using the full power of the Executive Branch to make life hellish for one man who had the misfortune of being mistakenly deported—the government’s plan to deport him before trial serves another malevolent purpose.

Deporting Abrego ensures that much of the underlying record—both the suspect circumstances of his deportation and the details of the prosecution—remain sealed and buried. If he’s gone, there’s no trial. And if there’s no trial, there’s no public reckoning.

The indictment itself already reads like something of a stretch. And the factual record about what happened to Abrego in El Salvador—and the conditions of his detention—could prove deeply inconvenient for the government. Quietly deporting him to a third country would bury that evidence forever.

So here we are, with a criminal defendant entitled to be at liberty but pleading to be kept in jail, where it’s safer. A man who never should have been deported is brought back not to be made whole, but to be prosecuted. Then, when that fails, to be vanished again.

It’s a tortuous saga, and it may be tempting to view it as an aberration. But it’s not. It’s a window into a government that regularly confuses its own political and propagandistic ends with national security—and that treats every argument against it as an act of aggression that must be crushed.

They are in it not to faithfully execute the law, but to win. To punish enemies. To intimidate opponents. With the structural checks and balances of government increasingly disabled or acquiescent, it falls to us—the people—to call them on it, and to raise our voices in protest at every turn.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Stephen Miller

Trump And Miller Brazenly Lie About Unanimous Supreme Court Order

Backing up the Trump administration, the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, says he has no intention or ability to return an unlawfully removed Maryland legal resident, Kilmar Abrego García, to the United States. Abrego García was wrongly deported to a notorious maximum security “mega-prison” for terrorists in El Salvador.

“How can I return him to the United States?” President Bukele said to reporters on Monday, during a meeting with President Donald Trump and his top officials in the Oval Office, as reported by The Washington Post. “I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it.”

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court in an apparent unanimous opinion ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Abrego García to the United States.

Minutes before President Bukele’s remarks, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, on-camera in the Oval Office, delivered what is being called an “outrageous misinterpretation” of the Supreme Court’s opinion, which was quickly condemned.

“I promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away,” Miller, who was the architect of the first Trump administration’s child separation policy, told reporters.

“What was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve, was it nine to nothing?” President Trump interjected.

“Yes, it was a 9-0, in our favor,” Miller wrongly claimed. “against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.”

“As Pam said,” Miller continued, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “the ruling solely stated that if this individual—at El Salvador’s sole discretion—was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time.”

“No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here, because he is a citizen of El Salvador,” Miller claimed, before pointing reporters to Bukele.

“That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him,” said Miller.

Attorney Michael Kasdan responded to Miller’s remarks: “We have reached the point where the White House openly lies on television about what a unanimous Supreme Court ruling against them says. The stuff of dystopian novels.”

“This is a blatant lie. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 AGAINST Trump,” wrote the progressive nonprofit People For the American Way.

“This is deeply Orwellian. The Court ruled against the Trump administration 9-0,” observed the MeidasTouch Network.

Conservative legal activist and political commentator Ed Whelan, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, weighed in.

“Outrageous misrepresentation of Supreme Court ruling,” Whelan declared, serving up a somewhat technical legal analysis. “The unanimous Court ruled that the district-court order ‘properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.’ Yes, the Court also stated that the “intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority,” and it told the district court to ‘clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.’ But: (1) ‘due regard’ doesn’t mean that the district court couldn’t give any teeth to ‘effectuate’; (2) in any event, the district court dropped ‘effectuate’ from its revised order, so this is all irrelevant. Duty to ‘facilitate’ continues.”

Commenting on the video, immigration attorney Allen Orr Jr. Esq. wrote: “When you tell yourself the story you want to believe even when it is fiction.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Monsters Inc.: The Unconscionable White House Assault On Abrego Garcia

Monsters Inc.: The Unconscionable White House Assault On Abrego Garcia

Passover began this past weekend with the traditional meal and discussion known as the “seder.”

“Seder” means order, and the meal requires a precise liturgy unchanged for thousands of years. (The English translation has undergone a few rewrites to soften up the edges of what is a fairly martial story.) I was struck, as I hadn't been previously, by the following line recited during the breaking of the middle matzoh: “For the sake of our redemption, we say together the ancient words which join us with our people and with all who are in need, with the wrongly imprisoned and the beggar in the street.”

The reference to the "wrongly imprisoned” this weekend of course brought immediately to mind Kilmar Abrego Garcia, now residing in a hellhole gulag due entirely to his wrongful, mistaken deportation by the United States. I have previously analyzed the rank lawlessness and unconstitutionality of his abduction by the Trump Administration. And last Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court affirmed that the Constitution requires the government to facilitate his release from custody in El Salvador

.

The Administration filed its latest response in the case on Sunday. It is a model of disingenuousness and arrogant contempt. The response simply ignores Judge Paula Xinis’s demand to explain what steps the government has taken—or contemplates taking—to reverse the deep injustice. It goes on to misconstrue the Supreme Court order, replacing the Court’s affirmation of Judge Xinis’s command to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return with a made-up distinction between 1) steps to remove domestic obstacles that impede his return (there are none), and 2) any efforts whatsoever to effect Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.

The supposed distinction tracks neither what the Supreme Court ordered nor the law. On the contrary, it mangles the Court’s opinion in what could only have been a purposeful way. The DOJ filing asserts that the Court ordered it to take “all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia.” But in fact, the Court expressly held that Xinis’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” It would have been a cynical and empty judicial command had it been limited to removing domestic obstacles to his return—whatever that even means.

Yes, there must be limits to the judiciary’s ability to nudge the Executive where the commands transgress demonstrable national security prerogatives, and those limits could be reached if El Salvador flatly refused to cooperate. Here, though, nobody with any sophistication doubts that El Salvadoran President Bukele will leap to do exactly what he thinks will please the U.S. president.

(In fact, an easy face-saving way out of the Abrego Garcia mess for the United States would be for President Bukele to announce today that, in his sovereign mercy, he is returning Abrego Garcia to the United States. If that happens, no one should be fooled: Bukele is a two-bit dictator who will do exactly what he thinks—or is told—Trump wants.)

The Administration’s filing sets the stage for a showdown with Judge Xinis on Tuesday, when she can be expected to excoriate DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign and demand actual answers and a good-faith showing that they’ve tried to comply with the order the Supreme Court affirmed.

But I want to focus today not on the patent lawlessness of the Department’s response but on its monstrousness. From the moment this grievous mistake was revealed, the Administration’s prevailing view about the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare they have imposed has been a mixture of indifference and enthusiasm.

Thus, Trump, Attorney General Bondi, Vice President Vance, and immigration czar Homan have all trotted out versions of the argument that the "administrative error” is insignificant because Abrego Garcia belongs in the El Salvador Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) anyway.

Vance argued, completely falsely, that Abrego Garcia was a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” when in fact he has never been convicted of that crime or any other in the United States. We’ve learned Vance was jumping to conclusions based on a stray suggestion from a confidential informant.

Bondi tried to deflect responsibility for the mistake onto immigration authorities. When a DOJ attorney acknowledged in court that the detention was an error—which was the only answer the attorney could have given consistent with his duty of candor to the court, and an answer the U.S. had already acknowledged—Bondi placed him and his supervisor on administrative leave for failing “to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.”

Trump most recently has asserted that Abrego Garcia is in the "sole custody of El Salvador" and that his return is therefore "up to President Bukele and his government.”

This contention is at best highly misleading, and designed to frustrate Judge Xinis, who has current control of Abrego Garcia's case with the support of a unanimous mandate from the Supreme Court to “require” the Government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release.

It is preposterous to argue—and the Administration has done nothing to show—that it would be anything other than a light lift to secure Abrego Garcia's release with a simple request to Bukele, who is due to visit the White House today. And the Court, in effect, has required the Administration to undertake that light lift, and not to try to play games with national security assertions that are really beside the point.

Again, though—bogus legal assertions aside—it is stunning that the Administration remains so committed to not remedying its own grave error. Its bullheaded, reflexive position is basically: “Oh well, so we made a mistake, but there’s nothing to be done about it.”

This stance is a grotesque rejection of the most fundamental axiom of the rule of law and civilized society.

Here is how one eminent American jurist put it: “[i]f the rule of law is not the same for everyone, then it is not the rule of law.” His colleague echoed the sentiment when he proclaimed that equal justice under law “means that every person, regardless of wealth or power or station, is entitled to the same fair process.”

As the passage in the Seder makes plain, this recognition—far more than a precept of American law—is an axiom in the Judeo-Christian tradition, central to the rule of law everywhere it exists. It is firmly endorsed in the writings of the Founders. Ben Franklin is the source of the famous maxim: better one hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.

Consider that idea, and the recognition of the ultimate horror of punishing the innocent that it encapsulates. Franklin is asserting—and his assertion has become talismanic—that a high cost to public safety and justice is better than the conviction of a single innocent. How much worse, then, is the summary delivery to barbaric life imprisonment of a man who should never have been rounded up in the first place?

The Administration has stood the Franklin adage on its head, changing it to something like: it is great that 100 persons we think are guilty should suffer, but greater still that 100 guilty persons and one innocent person suffer.

The U.S. government is ostensibly our government—a government of the people. Exercising power in our name, the president has brought shame upon all Americans with his embrace of a paradigmatic injustice, coupled with the lie that letting an innocent man rot in prison is a foreign policy imperative against which the law, the Constitution, and fundamental morality all must give way.

The coming test in the Supreme Court will pit first principles of justice and human decency against an arid claim that the intonation of the words “foreign affairs” or “national security” is a license for evil. As it did unanimously last week, the Court must stand firm against that grotesque assertion.

By the way, the names of the eminent jurist and colleague who so firmly recognized the principle that requires the return of Abrego Garcia: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice (and Trump appointee) Brett Kavanaugh.

Talk to you later.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

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