It’s the administrative error from hell — and that should terrify all of us.
||| FROM WASHINGTON POST |||
Where it stands right now is that Kilmar Abrego García appears to be out of options. The United States government says it is not legally obligated to save him; the Salvadoran president says his country couldn’t help even if it wanted to. At every turn, this seems to have been a miscarriage of every definition of justice, and it’s worth reminding ourselves just how in God’s name we got here and what it means.
On March 12, Abrego García had just picked up his 5-year-old, special-needs son when he was stopped by immigration agents and secreted away to the Terrorism Confinement Center prison in El Salvador. Many of the hundreds of people sent to CECOT remain nameless and story-less. There is little information about who they are or what they have been accused of doing, which has made it difficult to hold them up as poster children for the Trump administration’s questionable actions.
But Abrego García, it became pretty clear, was neither who the government said he was, nor likely guilty of what he had been accused of. The Trump administration first claimed Abrego García was a dangerous criminal in the country illegally. But later, the administration admitted that the man had no criminal record and was actually a legal resident deported as the result of an administrative error. Whoopsie. According to previous court filings, the man had fled El Salvador not because he was in a gang but because he was being targeted by a gang, which he and his brother refused to join. Whoopsie!
And so he, along with Andry Hernandez Romero, a theater-loving, gay makeup artist whose tattoos celebrating a flamboyant Three Kings Day festival were apparently confused with gang ink — truly, you cannot make this up — became focal points around which the country could organize its attention.
Last Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government should bring Abrego García home, writing that a lower court judge had “properly require[d] the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”
“Facilitate” is a strange word, mealy and vague. You could read it as “make it happen,” i.e., a corporate boss encouraging employees to facilitate this project’s completion by Monday morning. Or you could read it as earnestly helpful, i.e., a Boy Scout offering his arm to an elderly woman. Because I have a 3-year-old, I mostly think of it in the context of flailing limbs and pajamas: Bedtime is gonna be facilitated no matter what.
But in court filings released on Sunday, the Justice Department argued that “facilitate” had a very specific legal use. A rather passive definition, namely “actions allowing an alien to enter the United States.”
So, rather than “facilitating” Abrego García’s return in any meaningful way, federal officials are arguing that it was actually not their responsibility to bring Abrego García home. Though they could allow him to enter the United States, they simply could not compel El Salvador to return him to the United States because it would violate El Salvador’s status as a “sovereign nation.”
First: Can you imagine being such a cartoonishly evil henchman that your legal position is that since you’ve already screwed a man once, you are obligated to screw him forever?
Second: Every word of this cockamamie court filing is execrable, disingenuous rot.
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When we gather on Saturday on the Village Green, may we focus on this horrible “bureaucratic error” as what it actually is (no error, rather a step in an exercise in softening our sense of outrage for further outrages to come) ? Especially as now our elected leader has discussed his interest in “deporting” even US=born citizens. AS we know from recent history, first “they” come for the least protected, but the project of control and marginalization is to escalate. Will protest also escalate in ways that can affect these choices? or will resistance just take the form of grumpy subversion as in James C Scott’s “Weapons of the Weak”?
This opinion piece fails to mention that Kilmar Abrego García is a citizen of El Salvador, not the United States. The administration’s mistake in deporting him back to where he came from is tragic for him but what is the US now supposed to do for an El Salvadoran citizen who is back in El Salvador? The government of El Salvador surely has sovereignty on it’s own soil, concerning it’s own citizens, does it not? Garcia’s legal recourse appears to be through the El Salvadoran courts. I don’t know if Garcia has a legal basis for suing the US government to try and force it to rectify it’s mistake.
The real issue is much less about one particular man’s story and much more about the current administration flouting direct legal orders from the courts. Sr. Garcia is just the unfortunate poster child for an authoritarian executive that refuses to respect, let alone administer, the rule of law.
Apparently, Rick Larsen also mistakenly believes that Garcia is a U.S. citizen. The quantum of misinformation fomented by Democrats over this matter shows how desperate they are for attention. Their brand is considered toxic by a majority of actual U.S. citizens who now realize that the Biden immigration tidal wave was a deliberate attempt to reshape the electorate.
Garcia was determined to be eligible for immediate deportation by not one, but two Federal judges, as a known member of the MS-13 gang who entered the U.S. illegally. He is now in the custody of the country of his legal citizenship.
Don’t fall for this psyop.
Gang member or not (no one thinks he’s a US citizen, only that the same thing could’ve happened to a US citizen ), he had a bag on his head before he could prove courts had indisputably granted him permission to remain.
The ICE-ing on the cake here is that the government lawyers admit Garcia was permitted to remain and was put on the plane by mistake.
“So what?”or “Now what?”