Contrary to the Trump administration's previous claims, it wasn't difficult at all to get El Salvador to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States.
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For weeks, Trump administration officials and lawyers had maintained that it would be impossible to compel El Salvador to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man it had mistakenly deported to his native country, to the United States. As it turns out, doing so wasn’t hard after all.
All it took was securing an indictment first.
However, before we get to that, let’s recall that, even though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court’s ruling that ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, the administration refused to do so.
For example, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who visited the high-security prison where Abrego Garcia (and more than 200 others who were sent there in March) was being held, said under oath last month that “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”
In addition, Department of Justice lawyers had assured a federal judge that their supposed good faith efforts to compel Abrego Garcia’s return were unsuccessful.
Friday’s events, however, seem to indicate that they all lied.
That’s when Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had previously said that Abrego Garcia “is not coming back to our country,” announced that the Maryland resident had been indicted on two felony charges of transporting undocumented immigrants and conspiring with others to do so.
“Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,” Bondi told reporters, adding a bit later that “this is what American justice looks like.”
Ironically, this is also exactly the outcome that the judge (whose ruling the administration defied) and rights groups and congressional Democrats had called for.
While Republicans and their allies in the media had tried to make it sound as though they all wanted violent criminals on American streets, this case was always about the rule of law and due process.
What neither Bondi, nor anybody else in the administration, has wanted to acknowledge is that “American justice” does not mean deporting/trafficking people without due process.
If a jury ultimately finds Abrego Garcia, or any of the hundreds of others who are now incarcerated abroad without being given an opportunity to defend themselves, guilty of crimes, then they should be imprisoned in the US or deported to their home countries.
That’s how things are supposed to work.
Now, Abrego Garcia will have an opportunity to fight these charges if he so chooses.
And that could become quite interesting.
In a trial, the government will have to prove the charges it outlined in the 10-page indictment.
It is noteworthy that, while administration officials, including Bondi, have accused Abrego Garcia of being a terrorist, and while the attorney general said on Friday that he had abused women, solicited nude images of a minor, played a role in a murder, and been involved in trafficking guns and drugs, he is not being charged with any of these crimes.
There are also some questions about the investigation that resulted in the indictment.
As ABC News first reported, Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, where the probe was conducted, resigned abruptly on the same day Abrego Garcia was indicted.
In a LinkedIn post, Schrader said that it “has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.”
It remains to be seen how all of this plays out, but that is exactly what a trial is for.
That is what American justice looks like.
Speaking of American justice. The fact that the administration was able to get Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador will be of great interest to the attorneys of some of the other individuals who are incarcerated there.
Earlier this week, a federal judge ordered the administration to come up with a way that guarantees the nearly 140 Venezuelan men who are held in the prison a way to challenge their deportations to a third country.
Now, the administration will no longer be able to claim that these individuals are out of reach of the US government.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
