Kilmar Abrego Updates
After moving and my second bout with Covid, I’m healthy again and settled in. Obviously there has been a boatload of news since you last heard from me and much of it awful. But I’m going to focus today on where the Kilmar Abrego cases are as I believe they’re a perfect exemplar of how the second Trump administration is going. (Just a bookkeeping note — we learned only recently that he prefers to be identified as Kilmar Abrego rather than Kilmar Abrego Garcia so I will be doing that going forward.)
Bottom line if you don’t want to go into details:
The government deported Abrego to El Salvador despite a court order saying he could not be deported to El Salvador, intentionally defied a court order to turn the plane he was on around, lied to the courts about that, desperately sought information to paint him as a criminal after admitting he was sent to El Salvador by error, fired the lawyer who told the courts he was sent there by error, lied about not having jurisdiction over him, and are now wanting to deport him without any court adjudication which is causing a judge to consider some sort of action to block his second unjustified removal to a third party country.
Despite several assurances to multiple judges that the United States government had no ability to return Abrego to the United States and that El Salvador had full custody and jurisdiction over his status, the government of El Salvador filed documents with the United Nations explicitly stating that their deal with the United States meant the United States maintained jurisdiction over the prisoners at CECOT. There are only two options here — the government of El Salvador is lying or the government of the United States is lying.
The lawyers who told Judge James Boasberg that El Salvador had control were ALREADY facing contempt charges for defying the court orders to turn the plane around and to return Abrego to the United States. That contempt charge has been held up by the appeals court for months now but when it resumes, expect the lie that the United States had no ability to return him to be added to it.
Previously, an argument could be made that these false statements to the courts were due to incompetence rather than malfeasance. We now know that is not true thanks to whistleblower Erez Reuveni, the Department of Justice lawyer who was fired for correctly telling the court Abrego was sent to El Salvador by mistake. Mr. Reuveni has turned over emails and text messages regarding the case. Those communications show the government lied to the courts about the status of the flights and that the decision to ignore the court order about returning the flights was intentionally made by Emil Bove.
Mr. Abrego is currently in government custody as Judge Paula Xinis decides how to proceed. After publicly saying he would be tried on trafficking charges before any immigration actions were taken, the government is now planning to remove him to another country immediately upon his release. Xinis ordered the government to produce a witness who could testify to the details of the planned actions. Instead they had Thomas Giles, an assistant ICE director, testify about the general process for removals. Giles’s personal knowledge of this case did not extend past publicly available information and a few emails which did not contain specific plans of action. The government was ordered to produce someone who could answer questions about this specific case and instead produced someone who didn’t know any more about it than I do.
We should see further action in that case later this week and it’s likely Judge Xinis is going to protect Mr. Abrego from deportation until a resolution can be reached regarding the numerous government lies.
In the meantime, the government has been publicly smearing Mr. Abrego. Per Mr. Reuveni’s emails, the Department of Justice KNEW Mr. Abrego was not a high ranking official in MS-13 and scrambled to find evidence saying he was after Pam Bondi publicly made the claim. In fact the evidence he was associated with the gang at all is paper thin. The government is now offering ACTUAL MS-13 members deals if they will say Mr. Abrego was a member of the gang.
Kilmar Abrego is the ONLY person ever released from CECOT prison. He has detailed the torture inmates there are undergoing. We took an innocent man and sent him to one of the world’s worst prisons despite a court order explicitly stating he could not be sent to that country. The government lied repeatedly, in court, about this action. Our highest ranking officials, including the president and the attorney general, lied about him in order to smear him as a criminal gang member who deserved to be tortured in a foreign prison no one has ever been released from.
This is the case we know the most about. There are other innocent men being tortured in CECOT prison who were sent there for no other reason than the color of their skin. ICE was just ordered by a judge in California to stop driving around and arresting men for NO other reason other than their race. We have detained multiple United States citizens. We are detaining HUNDREDS of men who have not even been accused of crimes in a Florida concentration camp. Someone in that camp yelled out to Representative Maxwell Frost that they were a US citizen. Conditions in that facility are horrific with detainees sleeping on the floor in bathrooms, only receiving one meal a day, etc…
Stories like these are happening nationwide and they are all a direct consequence of electing Donald Trump.
We are not yet six months into this administration.
It is absolutely going to get worse.
But we are also seeing resistance at all levels. Those actions, protests, spaces, and communities are more important than ever right now — they are how we are going to get through this.
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