The Bravery of Kilmar Ábrego García vs. the Barbarism of Donald Trump

Baltimore—On Monday at 6:30 am, hundreds of people gathered outside the ICE field in Baltimore to be there with Kilmar Ábrego García and his family as he entered the building to face almost certain federal detention. The headlines say that Ábrego García will likely be “deported,” but that is not what this should be called. The Trump administration is attempting to abduct Ábrego García as part of a human-trafficking operation in which it pays countries with atrocious human rights records to incarcerate people who had been US immigrants. It wants to send Ábrego García—born in El Salvador, living in Temple Hills, Maryland—to Uganda, where he could be jailed indefinitely, tortured, and God knows what else.

Ábrego García’s “crime,” we must recall, was no crime at all. The Trump Justice Department admitted in court that it had imprisoned him and sent him to an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison due to an “administrative error.” The judge was appalled, particularly that Ábrego García—a union worker legally in the United States—was sent to be brutalized in El Salvador without due process, and the judge insisted that he be brought back to his family. That was March, and Ábrego García has been in hell ever since. Ábrego García is not suffering because of anything he did. He is suffering because the Trump regime’s autocratic outlook is defined by the idea that it cannot make any mistakes. The great leader, and by extension his slavishly loyal hacks, must be infallible. Therefore, in Ábrego García’s case, the person fired by the Justice Department was not the one who made the “administrative error” but the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who admitted it in court. Think about it: The Trump administration fired a Justice Department attorney for not lying to a judge.

Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, the crusading law-and-order Christian who authorizes deals with child predators to protect her boss, simply rejects due process as an inviolate constitutional right. After all, if people still have due process, it gums up the administration’s mass human-trafficking plan. If Ábrego García were to go free, it would legitimize the concerns of the judge and Bondi/Trump’s own former immigration lawyer, Reuveni, that due process had been denied.

The regime’s case is a marriage between lazy incompetence and legalized barbarism. First, it said Ábrego García was in the gang MS-13 because he was a Chicago Bulls fan. When that argument fell apart, it claimed that Ábrego García was a human trafficker. (Accusing others of what it does has gotten so tired at this point.) Then Trump officials said he was an abuser of women—a charge his wife rejects—and we were supposed to take seriously that an administration stacked with alleged rapists really cares about the safety of women, but that claim, too, fell apart. Then the charge was driving undocumented people across state lines. That’s what earns you Uganda. Normalizing cruelties—and nativist white nationalism—is the point. If they can normalize discourse like that of balding 31-year-old “Trump youth leader” Charlie Kirk, who called Black and brown people living in cities “cockroaches” in order to support a military occupation of Chicago, then the battle is mostly won. (Having Kirk as a special guest of the Chicago Cubs last week—like he’s just another celeb—also makes this rank nativist bigotry seem ordinary and endangers many of their own players. Clearly the Cubs’ owner, TomRicketts—a dark-money GOP patron—does not care.)

In the face of this army of cowards is Kilmar Ábrego García. The Trump administration offered Ábrego García a deal where he could be deported to Costa Rica with the promise of serving no jail time. He said no and is risking everything—indefinite incarceration in Uganda!—to stand up for those who cannot stand up for themselves. It is especially poignant because a judge released him only four days ago to await ICE sentencing. After months of being in an El Salvadoran slave-labor prison and a Tennessee detention center, Ábrego García has had four days with his wife and children before being taken away again. That judge had actually been holding him in the Tennessee jail to keep ICE from grabbing him. It was legal protective custody against our own unlawful government.

Before entering the courthouse, flanked by his family, his union, local politicians, and hundreds of community members, Ábrego García addressed the crowd: “Thank you to my wife, Jennifer, my family, my union, CASA, my home away from home, and all of you. You have filled me with gratitude, and you have filled me with hope. Happiness is just being with my family. When I was detained, I thought about going to the park with my family or on a trampoline with my children. Those moments give me hope in this fight. To all the families that have been separated or are being threatened with separation, this administration has given us heartache. But God is with us, will never leave us, and will bring justice. With our community by our side, love will triumph. Never lose hope. We are all family. Regardless of what happens at my ICE check-in, please promise you will still pray, resist, fight, love, and continue to demand freedom.”

Then Ábrego García entered the building, flanked by his attorney and family. Meanwhile, ICE agents looked down smugly from the top of the stairs at the throngs of people. It did not take long before word got out that the expected had taken place: An authoritarian, weak-minded administration petrified of looking weak had put Ábrego García in chains.

They want to send Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda for no reason other than that it endangers their nativist project to treat him like a human being and not “a cockroach.” Let the last word go to Ábrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who accompanied him into the facility. The sneering ICE brigade around her husband was clearly chosen for the cameras. They were all white, tatted up, and so bulky that their muscles had swallowed their necks. Vasquez Sura stared at these men twice her size and said, “Tonight when you look at your family or look at your kids, think about the fact that today you kidnapped my husband and took him away from us.”

These shameful pissants wouldn’t meet her eyes, showing no heart and spine to go with their lack of necks. Vasquez Sura showed us true courage. Now it’s our turn. We need to fight Trump’s human-trafficking scheme for her, for Ábrego García, and for all the people in our communities who could be forcibly put on a plane and sent to an undisclosed location.