Abrego Is Home. But For How Long?

The Trump administration's cruelty is on full display

On Friday afternoon, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was released from prison in the Middle District of Tennessee.

The Maryland man illegally deported to a Salvadoran gulag in March is finally home with his wife and children. But the Trump administration is still working overtime to destroy the refugee who embarrassed them by revealing the lawless cruelty of its third country rendition policy.

Kafka could never

On March 12, Abrego was driving his son home when ICE agents stopped the car and told him his immigration status had “changed.” They threatened to put the boy in foster care if Abrego’s wife took more than ten minutes to pick him up — and that was only the beginning of the government’s monstrous cruelty. Unbeknownst to Abrego, he’d just been swept up in a dragnet designed to secretly kidnap migrants to CECOT prison in El Salvador. ICE agents fanned out across the country snatching up every foreign national they could get their hands on, most of whom, like Abrego, were paying taxes, taking care of their families, and doing no harm to anybody.

But unlike most of the men on the March 15 flights to CECOT, Abrego had an even greater legal claim to protection since he had a binding judicial order from 2019 barring his deportation to his native El Salvador, where he’d been pursued by the Barrio 18 gang.

On March 24, Abrego’s wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura filed a habeas action in the District Court of Maryland demanding her husband’s return. At first the government conceded that it sent Abrego to CECOT in error and in violation of the withholding order. But soon enough it pivoted to outlandish claims that he was a human trafficker, deliberately deported, and certain never to return.

In part this was pure thuggishness. But the government had an additional reason to dig in because, if it admitted it could get Abrego back, it would have to admit that it retained constructive custody over all the deportees it paid Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to lock up without charge.