Kilmar Abrego Garcia is just the latest example of cases in which the administration is finding the flimsiest of reasons to label undocumented immigrants as “criminals.”
Last Friday, the Trump administration suddenly announced that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been brought back to the United States from the mega-prison in El Salvador, CECOT, two months after the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the administration must facilitate his return.
It ought to have been cause for celebration. But it wasn’t. Instead of returning Garcia to his family in Maryland, officials sent him to a jail in Tennessee, where he is now facing an array of human trafficking charges that could result in his spending the rest of his life behind bars.
I guess it’s possible that Garcia is indeed a master of deception; that all the years he spent as a construction worker in Maryland since his arrival in 2011 were nothing but a smokescreen. But it’s also possible that the government has gone on a fishing expedition, dredging up an old traffic stop in Tennessee, during which the officers who stopped him alleged that he was driving a car full of undocumented immigrants rather than the construction workers Garcia claimed they were, in an apparent attempt to give an after-the-fact justification for Garcia’s entirely unjustified deportation to CECOT in March. It seems entirely likely that they are making Garcia out to be a high-level criminal operative because that’s more palatable to them than admitting that they screwed up with his initial deportation.
From the get-go, the administration has refused to back down gracefully in the Garcia case. After government officials acknowledged that he was deported because of an “administrative error”—along with a couple hundred other Venezuelan and El Salvadoran men who were quite deliberately, and in cold blood, deported to indefinite detention in CECOT—the administration fired the Justice Department lawyer who let it be known in court that he was uncomfortable with what had gone down for not being loyal enough to Trump’s agenda. When US district judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to provide additional information on the case, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials invoked manifestly bogus national security arguments as a rationale for not complying. And when the courts, including the US Supreme Court, ordered them to “facilitate” the return of Garcia, the administration simply pretended that it had no sway over El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and couldn’t compel Garcia’s return (a fiction that was promptly undermined by Trump’s admitting that he could easily secure Garcia’s release if he wanted to, but that he chose not to).
Now, the administration is further weaponizing the justice system to legitimize their actions against Garcia. So blatant is this that a veteran DOJ prosecutor in Nashville, Tennessee, Ben Schrader, resigned over concerns that Garcia was being prosecuted as a vindictive political reprisal rather than on anything approaching a bulletproof case.
It’s part of a pattern of going after any and all undocumented immigrants, and then finding the flimsiest of reasons to label them “criminals” or “terrorists,” and those who support and provide services to them as aiders and abetters of criminals.
Witness what has been happening in Los Angeles over the past months. In mid-April, plainclothes DHS agents attempted to gain access to first graders in two elementary schools in the city, fraudulently claiming that both the children’s guardians had given their permission for the interviews, and that they were only doing wellness checks to make sure the kids weren’t being abused by criminally minded undocumented guardians.
And this past week garment workers and day laborers have been dragged, handcuffed, from their jobs, warehoused in makeshift detention centers, and pressured to sign papers agreeing to be deported. Some of them have then been summarily dumped at the border crossings and made to walk into Mexico.
Those who have hit the streets to oppose these tactics are being labeled “insurrectionists,” to justify the federalizing of national guard troops and US marines against protesters. Among those caught in this vise was SEIU California president David Huerta, who was arrested at the protests last week, and who spent two days in jail before posting bond. He is being charged with conspiracy to impede an officer and could, if convicted, spend years in a federal prison.
Astoundingly, on Thursday, when US Senator Alex Padilla, who was in LA to receive a briefing with Gen. Gregory Guillot about conditions on the ground, attempted to ask DHS Secretary Kristi Noem questions at an event she was holding in the federal building in West Los Angeles, he was violently manhandled out of the building by buzz-cut FBI agents.
“He tried to ask the Secretary a question, and was forcibly removed by federal agents, forced to the ground and handcuffed. He is not currently detained, and we are working to get additional information,” his press office said.
Lest anyone think this isn’t a full-court effort to intimidate allies of immigrants into submission, House and Senate committees have over the past few days sent letters to 200 NGOs, including CHIRLA, the leading immigrants-rights organization in Los Angeles, accusing them of illegally assisting undocumented immigrants during the Biden years and of illegal actions this week against federal officers looking to arrest migrants.
In San Diego, a neighborhood trattoria was raided, all of the workers were handcuffed, and—in the face of neighborhood opposition and protest—several were bundled into vans and driven off to a detention facility.
In California’s farm belt, raids have been occurring this week against farm laborers—which, if they continue, could ultimately result in fruit and vegetable shortages across the country as harvest go unpicked. Elsewhere in the state, car washes are being raided.
Such raids are going on nationwide, from West Coast cities through to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, in Massachusetts, with snatch-and-grab ICE operations shamefully marketed to the MAGA base with names such as Operation Patriot.
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Let’s be absolutely clear: There’s literally nothing patriotic in sending masked, armed, agents in unmarked vehicles to kidnap hardworking family men and women, to ship them off to unidentified detention sites, and to deny them access to phones and to attorneys, as is currently happening all over the country.
Stephen Miller, avatar of all things awful when it comes to immigration enforcement, has demanded at least 3,000 arrests per day. To get there, ICE agents are abandoning all but the flimsiest pretenses that they are only focusing on dangerous criminals. They are, quite simply, going after any and all undocumented residents, from elementary school kids through to factory workers, casually labeling them as “criminal” and seeking to bypass the due process protections that are constitutionally guaranteed.
There is a word for this—it’s an overused word, these days, but it is entirely apropos—fascism. When men, women, and children are terrorized by armed agents, when US senators are brutalized by federal agents for peacefully asking questions of cabinet secretaries, when the US military is called out against protesters—that is, plain and simple, fascism.
Saturday is No Kings Day. May Americans, in the tens of millions, pour onto the streets against this foul assault on American democracy.
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