When the executive branch of the U.S. government publicly turns its power against an individual, that person will need to marshal enormous personal courage and committed legal representation if he is to slip the many snares and stratagems that can be deployed against him.
A Salvadoran national by the name of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García can attest to this. Ábrego García, who is about 30 years old, entered the United States illegally at about age 16 and lived in this country without authorization until a pivotal arrest by federal agents in Maryland on March 12, 2025. I say “pivotal” because he had previously been stopped or arrested by U.S. law enforcement without the storm that grew out of his March 12 arrest.
Arguably the most significant of these other encounters was his March 2019 stop by a police officer outside a Home Depot store in Hyattsville, Md., as he and three other men waited around hoping to be hired as day laborers. That stop led to Ábrego García’s being handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for federal immigration action. It was during his interactions with the Hyattsville Police Department and gang detectives of the Prince George’s County Police Department (the city of Hyattsville is in Prince George’s County) that an assessment of MS-13 gang affiliation became attached to Ábrego García. He was not charged with any crimes and therefore has not been tried on any criminal matter, but the MS-13 label has stuck.
Ábrego García sought release from immigration detention, but this was denied, although the immigration judge hearing his case noted contradictions and inconsistencies in the government’s allegations against the Salvadoran. Nonetheless, a police informant’s assertion that Ábrego García was associated with MS-13 was enough for him to be denied release from ICE custody. He then applied for asylum, but that was denied on the basis that U.S. law specifies that a person seeking asylum must file a claim within one year of entering the country. Ábrego García was many years late with his asylum petition.
He then applied for protection from removal to El Salvador on the basis that he feared for his safety in his native country. At that time, El Salvador was still a pretty dangerous place, with President Nayib Bukele just ramping up his war against the bloodthirsty gangs that had held a knife to El Salvador’s throat for many years. A judge granted Ábrego García’s request for protection from removal to El Salvador.
That was his status until March 12, when he was arrested by federal agents while on his way home with his young child after finishing his workday. Three days later, he was among a three-plane load of undocumented immigrants flown from the U.S. to El Salvador to be incarcerated without trial or any other due process at Bukele’s maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center, known by the acronym CECOT.
His deportation, which took place on March 15, violated the order of protection from removal to El Salvador that the judge had issued. The Trump administration said Ábrego García had been deported in error. Ábrego García’s wife, a U.S. citizen, sued to compel the Trump administration to bring her husband back to the U.S. A U.S. district judge ordered that he be returned, but President Trump himself declared that he had no power to bring Ábrego García back. About this time, El Salvador’s Bukele came to Washington for a White House visit with Trump. It was a reward for his accepting planeloads of deportees, including Venezuelans, from the U.S. and locking them up in CECOT in exchange for millions of dollars from the U.S.
During Bukele’s obligatory Oval Office sit-down with Trump in front of news cameras, Trump and Bukele both were asked about the judge’s order that Ábrego García be returned to the U.S. Each dishonestly offered some form of a dodge about being powerless to do anything. In an exchange with Bukele separate from the formal news appearance, Trump tells Bukele that he would like to send “homegrown criminals” — U.S. citizens, if his meaning is not clear to you — to imprisonment in El Salvador, and he encourages Bukele to build more CECOTs.
The Trump administration went to the Supreme Court to fight the lower-court ruling that Ábrego García be brought back, but the justices disappointed Trump by ruling that the government should “facilitate” Ábrego García’s return to the U.S.
In early June, the Trump administration did return Ábrego García to U.S. soil, but it did so on the transparently spurious grounds of federally charging him with human trafficking.
On his return, he was immediately jailed in Tennessee.
In late 2022, Ábrego García had been stopped while driving on Interstate 40 in Tennessee. The Tennessee Highway Patrol report from the stop says that his driver’s license had expired and that he told the attending officer that he was transporting eight passengers from Houston to St. Louis and on to Maryland for construction work. The officer suspected “human trafficking.” A note in Ábrego García’s driver’s license record mentioned the suspected MS-13 connection. ICE was contacted but declined to take Ábrego García into custody, and, ultimately, no charges were filed against him in relation to that traffic stop.
That traffic stop became the basis for the case of human trafficking that the Trump administration said was the reason for his being returned to the U.S. His lawyers fought on, and judges ordered that Ábrego García be released from custody. He was eventually released but immediately taken back into custody by ICE, and he faced the danger of deportation to a third country. In fact, Pam Bondi’s Justice Department gave Ábrego García an ultimatum: Plead guilty to the charge of human trafficking or be deported to a country in Africa.
He refused and continued his legal fight. Hence his release from ICE custody on Thursday on a judge’s order. His fight is not over, of course. He still faces the danger of a cooked-up federal criminal case in the U.S. or vindictive deportation to a distant country with which he has no connection.
One aspect of the Ábrego García case that stands out is the reckless cruelty of the government in relation to this man. Donald Trump’s government means to triumph over him and make an example of him, and if it must break him and devastate his family in the process, so be it. After all, in the telling of the Trump administration, as voiced by Trump himself and by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, undocumented immigrants like Ábrego García are “the worst of the worst.”
Trump means to remove from the country the vast army of undocumented immigrants that forms a second society within our society, and that in itself is a lawful and proper objective. What is indecent and unacceptable is the manner in which Trump is going about this task, and his motives for taking on this work. Trump’s motives, as I say repeatedly, are not honorable. He, the most lawless U.S. president in modern times, is not seeking to uphold law and order and protect American citizens from criminal “aliens.”
Trump is pursuing a white-supremacist agenda against a steadily browning American populace. And he and his white-supremacist allies on the American far right understand that millions of undocumented immigrants producing Fourteenth Amendment-protected U.S.-citizen children is a hastening of the browning of America and the diluting of the political power of the white populace.
That is what the immigration clean-out is all about. For hard evidence, look no further than the glaring and outrageous contradiction in Trump’s policy toward South Africa’s white Afrikaner farming class vs. his attitude to brown and black undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Trump valorizes the Afrikaners, whose politicians were the architects of South Africa’s infamously racist apartheid system. He says falsely that the Afrikaners are being subjected to genocide by black South Africans and consequently need rescuing by the U.S. in the form of relocation to our shores. As for the latter group, the black and brown undocumented immigrants in the U.S., Trump demonizes and insults them and has unleashed his agents to hunt them down in the streets as if they are rabid animals.
Look also at Trump’s inane threat of military action in Nigeria supposedly to protect Christians who are being persecuted by the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram. Now, there is a population that actually needs protection against the mass kidnapping of schoolchildren, especially girls, and the slaughtering of civilians. But Trump will never countenance bringing the good Christian folk of Nigeria to the U.S. to protect them from genocidal harm. Why? They are black. They are not right for the U.S. asylum program. In fact, under Trump’s recent revision of the program, virtually the only people who now qualify for refugee status in the U.S. are Afrikaners, who are, of course, white and, Trump assumes, ideologically suited to the far-right U.S. mindset. And I wonder whether Trump raised the question of Nigerian Christians merely as a pretense at evenhandedness in his play at savior in Africa.
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There was a time when I believed that humanity was an ever-improving enterprise. I was mistaken. I misread the advance of science and the modernizing of our processes and accessories as the forward march of humanity. The truth is that our things are nicer but we are not. We constantly see evidence that human nature remains what it was at the birth of bipedalism. We are unchanged in spirit. We are a mixture of virtue and savagery eternally at war with each other. But I — and many others, I think — have failed to see this because of an erroneous reading of what constitute’s human improvement.
But that misapprehension can be corrected by apprehension, and there is enormous satisfaction in knowing that one does stand on the side of light and the angels. Trump’s side is rampant for a season, and then it will pass away. The light of goodness will shine again until the next season of darkness falls upon us. But the good dare not grow weary and must never cease from struggling against the dark. To surrender to the banishment of light means permanent night and its attendant nightmares. The Trump administration and its evil ways are a clear warning that all who stand for justice and right must never stand down.
Democracy Warrior 