There Will Be More Kilmar Abrego Garcias
A dark day in American history—and what the hell comes next.
DONALD TRUMP WAS NEVER GOING TO ALLOW EL SALVADOR’S rogue president, Nayib Bukele, to say he would let Kilmar Abrego Garcia come home.
“How can I return him to the United States?” Bukele asked with a smile in the Oval Office on Monday, clearly finding humor in reporters’ questions about the Maryland man the Trump administration admits it wrongly shipped off to Bukele’s gulag. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”
Trump and his acolytes believe they must never apologize and never retreat. (Thus saith Roy Cohn’s rules.) So their thinking presumably goes something like this: Allowing one innocent man to be sent back home would start a chain reaction of lawsuits and pleas for other innocent men—Bloomberg has reported that around 90 percent of those sent to El Salvador had no criminal record—to be released and returned to their families and homes.
Given Bukele’s history and ambitions, and his newly minted relationship with Trump,1 no one was surprised that during Monday’s Oval Office photo op Bukele claimed he is powerless to return Abrego Garcia. But something surprising did happen at that meeting. Trump was caught on a hot mic telling Bukele that “homegrown criminals are next.”
“You gotta build about five more places,” Trump told the Salvadoran dictator, so that he would have enough space in his maximum-security prison system to house the U.S. citizens—you read that right: U.S. citizens—Trump wants to send him. CECOT is simply “not big enough.”
Lawyers, advocates, and Democratic elected officials I spoke with after Trump’s Bukele meeting sounded as demoralized as they have been at any point since Trump took power.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) described Bukele as a “rogue mercenary who is complicit in human rights abuses,” and he told The Bulwark yesterday’s meeting attested to an “astounding level of corruption in the Oval Office.”
“You have the president of the United States working with a rogue Latin American leader to deny constitutional rights to people who were in the U.S., and potentially, to U.S. citizens in the coming months,” he said.
“We’ve been saying all along: this is an indiscriminate and shocking effort to fulfill quotas, to instill fear and panic, with no interest in following the rule of law,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the immigrant-rights group America’s Voice. She continued:
It should shock every American that this government is willing to ignore the Supreme Court, taking people from our communities—no judge, no jury—and then abandon[ing] them in prisons in another country. And now, they want to send U.S. citizens to El Salvador. This should send chills down people’s bones. Immigrants were always the tip of the spear, but this now has implications for all American families. It’s incredibly dangerous, and people need to speak up.
Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) said that the Trump and Bukele spectacle left him, like most Americans, “recoiling in horror.” He told The Bulwark he is introducing legislation called the Repatriation of Expelled Sovereign Citizens and Unjustly Exiled (RESCUE) Act that would punish foreign governments for refusing to comply with court orders mandating the release, repatriation, or return of a United States citizen, lawful permanent resident, or noncitizen who, at the time of removal, had lawful status under U.S. immigration law.
“The United States is governed by a pathological and malignant narcissist who is willing not only to wrongfully deport an innocent man, but also defy a unanimous order from the Supreme Court to reverse the wrongful deportation,” Torres said, calling it the very definition of a constitutional crisis. “If a foreign leader like Nayib Bukele refuses to facilitate the release of a wrongfully deported man, there should be geopolitical consequences, and those consequences should be swift and severe.”
Torres told me those punishments should include the suspension of normalized diplomatic relations, suspension of most-favored-nation trade status, the termination of foreign assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, the suspension of participation in bilateral agreements or dialogues, and a prohibition on visas for government officials of the offending country (and their immediate family members).
“We must create an enforceable means of defending due process,” he said. “Of all the abuses of Donald Trump, none poses a graver threat to liberty than his complete contempt for due process. Without due process, what would stop the Trump administration from wrongfully labeling anyone a non-citizen gang member, abducting him in the dead of night, and then rendering him to a foreign prison to be tortured?
“It’s in the self-interest of each to defend due process for all.”
What Comes Next? A Familiar Playbook
WE SHOULD REMEMBER THAT TRUMP’S PLAYBOOK BEGINS, as it did during his first term, with saying an out-of-control foreign gang has taken root on our shores, and that his forces have rounded them up for our protection. Eight years ago it was MS-13; this time it’s Tren de Aragua. We were initially told the 238 men sent to El Salvador were hardened Tren de Aragua gang members from Venezuela, but now we know most of them had no criminal records.
You’ve seen the pattern before: Trump pushes an initiative most Americans would theoretically support—shipping out the worst, most violent dudes—but by the second or third day, people who pay attention to newspapers or watch cable news (apart from Fox) have learned that what Trump was actually racing to do was strip innocent men of due process and fly them to a violent mega-prison from which no one has ever returned.
The administration appears to be rolling out the next phase of deportations on a similar rhetorical model.
A Washington Post report states that Trump’s goal is one million deportations this year, which is hardly viable even if you accept the administration’s own puffed-up figures. The story noted that one way to juice numbers would be to find ways to remove many of the roughly 1.4 million people who have received final deportation orders but whose countries of origin refuse to take them back. The report said the administration was negotiating with 30 nations to act as “third countries,” meaning they would agree to receive these noncitizen deportees.
On its face, this seems to have more of a respectable, even downright legal look than most of Trump’s other immigration-related initiatives. These people have final deportation orders, so send them out, right? Well, let’s pause for a moment to consider who would be affected by such an order. In many cases, it would mean abruptly casting out people who have been in the country for decades, who live with their U.S.-citizen families, and leaving them on a runway in Cameroon or Chile or Thailand or some other country where they have no ties at all.
“One other concern about targeting people with final orders is that some individuals—like Kilmar, for example—may have other forms of relief,” Kerri Talbot, the executive director of the Immigration Hub advocacy group, told The Bulwark. “People need time to consult an attorney before they get removed because they may be able to reopen their case even with a final order.”
We will again be told these are criminals and we are a nation of laws. But at this point, with the Trump administration now openly flouting Supreme Court rulings, who is supposed to believe that messaging?
“Their plan is not just mass deportation—it’s mass disappearances,” Castro told me. “There has been no accounting of what has happened to the people who have been deported so far and constant lies about who these people are.”
While Democrats have been continually criticized for what they’re doing to fight back against Trump, one lawmaker issued a warning should the president continue down the dark road he discussed with Bukele in the oval office.
“If this guy keeps ignoring court rulings or deports U.S. citizens,” the Democratic member of the House told me, “that’s a trigger for impeachment.” Will a sufficient number of the lawmaker’s Republican colleagues, though, be capable of recognizing a constitutional crisis at that point and join hands to enact such an urgent constitutional remedy?
One Last Thing
CITIZENS FOR ETHICS reports that as Trump pushes for companies to “hire American,” his own company is again looking to bring in seasonal foreign workers to staff up his resorts and golfing clubs. Funny how that works.
A bit of recent Salvadoran history illustrates how similar Bukele is to Trump: When Bukele’s party took over the national assembly, it changed the law so a president could serve consecutive terms, a change he quickly availed himself of, winning re-election. Then the government moved to retire judges over 60 with three decades of experience, which Bukele called a “purification of the Judicial System,” that opened up spots for 200 loyalist judges and a purge of “corrupt judges,” as Bukele put it. Hmm . . . where have I heard that language before?
There WILL be more Kilmar Abrego GArcias and future ones will be named Johnson, Smith, Henderson etc.
Anyone who disagrees with trumPinochet.
I'm just ashamed to be an American right now