The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.
That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.
After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.
For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.
In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.
Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.
Oh, so they could bring him back…
This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.
Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”
Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)
All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.
El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.
Turns out all of that was theater.
We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.
The new criminal indictment
It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.
But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:
Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children
This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.
At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.
Everything is backwards
Here, the entire process has been backwards:
The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.
The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.
That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Those words came not from a liberal jurist or a civil liberties activist, but from Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and one of the most respected conservative jurists in America. In a blistering opinion released yesterday, Wilkinson laid bare what’s at stake in the Abrego Garcia case: nothing less than the rule of law itself.
What triggered this extraordinary rebuke? The government “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process.” For weeks now, the Trump administration has played a dangerous constitutional game with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally trafficked to a Salvadoran prison despite a court order explicitly barring his deportation. When three separate courts — including the Supreme Court — ordered them to facilitate his return, administration officials mocked the very idea they could help and have since defied judicial commands with increasingly brazen contempt.
Over the last few days they ratcheted up the rhetoric, falsely claiming that (1) he wasn’t just a member of MS-13 but a “top” member who was also somehow “a terrorist,” (something for which multiple Article III courts have said there is no evidence to support) that (2) he was “arrested with rolls of cash and drugs” when he was simply wearing a sweatshirt that had an image with cash on it and someone else who was arrested with him had a small bag of weed in a pocket (3) that he was engaged in “human trafficking” (just completely made up bullshit).
In her statement to CNN, Vasquez Sura said she sought a civil protective order in 2021 after a disagreement with Abrego Garcia. Vasquez Sura noted she had survived a previous relationship that included domestic violence. She did not appear at a court hearing and the matter did not proceed.
“Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process,” she said in the statement. “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling. Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect.”
“That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added. “Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.”
Of course, even if all the smears against Garcia were true, none of it justifies violating the legal order that prevented him from being deported to El Salvador without any due process. That’s all that matters.
And if being accused of domestic violence means you deserve to be sent to a concentration camp with no due process, this administration is going to run out of people working for it very, very soon, because so many of them have faced similar accusations at one time or another.
It’s the standard Fox News playbook: when confronted with a victim of government overreach, pull out the “he’s no angel” template and fill in whatever blanks you can, evidence be damned. But no matter how many accusations they hurl, the fundamental fact remains unchanged: Abrego Garcia has never been convicted of a crime, and the U.S. legal system had explicitly barred him from being sent to El Salvador, let alone to a concentration camp.
But why let pesky facts get in the way of a good character assassination?
Which brings us back to Judge Wilkinson’s extraordinary opinion. After Judge Xinis scolded the DOJ for ignoring her order, the administration appealed yet again to the Fourth Circuit, where the panel had already rebuked them once. This time, Judge Wilkinson — a Reagan appointee once considered for the Supreme Court under George W. Bush — decided enough was enough.
Wilkinson is a famously right-wing Republican judge. He also, somewhat famously, is quite often willing to bless executive government overreach. Hell, he authored the (later overturned!) opinion that it was okay for the US government to seize and lock up an American citizen at Guantanamo with no charges or due process when he was found fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.
This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
As Wilkinson points out, no matter what the administration accuses him of, in the US he still deserves due process:
The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove “by a preponderance of evidence” that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal). Moreover, the government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was wrongly or “mistakenly” deported. Why then should it not make what was wrong, right?
He also completely dismantles the claim made by Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi that the Supreme Court’s decision allows the White House to do nothing. That’s just bullshit:
The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do essentially nothing. It requires the government “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2. “Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. See Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2 (“[T]he Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”). The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Cf. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400 (2024); Christensen v. Harris Cnty., 529 U.S. 576, 587 (2000). Thus, the government’s argument that all it must do is “remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia’s] return,” Mot. for Stay at 2, is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court’s command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.
From there, Wilkinson makes abundantly clear he knows that the Trump administration is playing games. He notes that they’re obviously frustrated with the rulings against them, but that does not give them the ability to simply ignore those rulings. He talks about the separation of powers, and how the judiciary clearly has the power to tell the executive branch when it is violating the laws or the Constitution. And he warns of what will happen if the Trump White House decides it can just ignore the courts:
Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.
And he closes with a clear statement directed at the White House that going down the road they clearly wish to go down will do great damage to the concept of America:
It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.
When a renowned conservative jurist — one who previously ruled it was legal to detain American citizens without charges at Guantanamo — warns a Republican president that he is threatening to destroy the rule of law and wreck “the American ethos,” that’s more than a legal opinion. It’s a desperate attempt to pull the country back from the brink.
As if to immediately test Wilkinson’s warning about the “public perception of lawlessness,” the very same day brought a stunning development that would expose the administration’s claims as hollow. Despite earlier being denied, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen was suddenly given the opportunity to meet with Abrego Garcia, proving that he was still alive and accessible (and allowing him to learn that many people are fighting for his basic rights).
I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return.
The timing couldn’t have been more revealing. On the same day a federal judge warned the administration about a constitutional crisis over its claim that accessing Garcia was impossible, a U.S. Senator managed to do exactly that.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had previously denied he even had the ability to release Garcia, posted some images of Garcia and Van Hollen meeting, though (of course) with a snarky bit of commentary, very much giving off “I’m not mad at all” vibes:
The claim that they were “sipping margaritas” was revealed to be completely staged nonsense, as apparently Bukele aids showed up with the props solely for the misleading photoshoot:
Mr. Bukele, in a social media post, even crowed that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” But according to a person familiar with the situation,a Bukele aide placed the two glasses with cherries and salted rims on the table in front of Mr. Van Hollen and Mr. Abrego Garcia in the middle of their meeting in an attempt to stage the photo.
It’s also pretty clear that the government gave Garcia fresh clothes (different from every other photograph of anyone in CECOT) as well as a baseball cap to cover up the shaved head that the guards at CECOT give to every prisoner sent into the concentration camp.
Bukele later posted, “I love chess,” pretending that this was all a strategic move, rather than one that makes him look incredibly weak. Bukele caved here, as the pressure on him has been increasing, and even he has to realize he’s losing this battle massively. Bukele tried to recover by then posting that Garcia “gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
But now he’s revealed that he absolutely can produce Garcia when a US government official shows up asking for him.
Even leaving aside the basic “what crime was he convicted of in which court” question that should accompany him “staying in El Salvador’s custody,” the fact of this meeting completely undermines the claims made by both Bukele and the Trump White House regarding their supposed inability to return Garcia to the United States.
If anyone was playing chess here, it appears those on the side of due process and rule of law have a much stronger position. They’ve shown that it is entirely possible for Bukele to produce Garcia, especially under political pressure from the United States. That bodes poorly for the Trump administration that earlier in the day had filed yet another “status report” in Judge Xinis’ court again failing to abide by her order and again professing that its hands were tied.
The meeting exposes a damning reality: for all of Trump’s boasts about being the ultimate dealmaker, a Democratic Senator accomplished what his administration claimed was impossible. The administration’s entire defense — that they had no ability to access Garcia — collapsed in an embarrassing instant.
Judge Wilkinson’s ruling called back to President Eisenhower, who was willing to set aside his “personal opinions” to abide by the laws of the United States, as defined by the courts.
It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower’s sage example. Putting his “personal opinions” aside, President Eisenhower honored his “inescapable” duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” Address by the President of the United States, Delivered from his Office at the White House 1-2 (Sept. 24, 1957); 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955). This great man expressed his unflagging belief that “[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts.” Id. at 3. Indeed, in our late Executive’s own words, “[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result.”
With Van Hollen’s visit, we now have definitive proof of what Judge Wilkinson suggested: it is absolutely possible for the US to secure access to Abrego Garcia. The district court, the appeals court, and the Supreme Court have all said — unanimously — that the White House must take affirmative steps to facilitate Garcia’s return to face the basic due process owed to everyone under our Constitution.
We now stand at that precise precipice Eisenhower warned about. Will the Trump administration continue defying the courts, pushing us toward what Eisenhower called “anarchy”? Or will the rule of law prevail?
The coming days will reveal whether this administration recognizes what Judge Wilkinson called its “unique chance to vindicate” the rule of law “while there is still time.” But with each passing day of defiance, the damage to our constitutional order grows deeper.
The Trump administration has settled on a terrifying new legal theory: they can declare anyone a “terrorist,” ship them to an offshore torture camp without due process, and courts can do nothing about it because it’s “foreign affairs.” This isn’t speculation — it’s the actual argument they’re making to justify their “accidental” trafficking of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s CECOT facility.
After initially admitting in court this was an “administrative error,” the administration has pivoted to an even more disturbing stance: they meant to do it all along, and they can do it to anyone. And they’ll just fucking lie about everything to pretend this is all perfectly normal and acceptable.
We mentioned some of this in our story yesterday about Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele’s shameful and dark press conference in the Oval Office, in which both of them denied the ability to bring Garcia back to the US (with Pam Bondi falsely claiming that the only thing the Supreme Court told them to do was send a plane if Bukele chose to release him, and Bukele bizarrely claiming that he couldn’t return Garcia because it would require “smuggling a terrorist” into the US, none of which is true).
The implications here are fucking terrifying. The administration is essentially arguing that once they declare someone a “terrorist” — based on “evidence” as flimsy as wearing a Chicago Bulls hat — they can disappear that person to an offshore torture facility with no due process and no judicial oversight. And they’re making this argument while simultaneously giving the middle finger to both a district court and the Supreme Court.
This authoritarian power grab became crystal clear when Trump advisor Stephen Miller started spewing his laughably false claim that the Supreme Court ruling about Garcia was actually a win for the administration. He’d been practicing this bullshit all morning in multiple media appearances, including a surprisingly contentious interview on Fox News.
Stephen Miller claims on Fox News that returning the Maryland father who was wrongly deported to El Salvador would constitute a "kidnapping" and "invasion of El Salvador's sovereignty.""He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador," Miller lies. "This was the right person sent to the right place."
So, I want to correct that. I hate to do it, Bill. I have to correct you on every single thing you just said, because it was all wrong.
First, we won the Supreme Court case, clearly, 9-0. A District Court judge said unconscionably that the president and his administration have to go into El Salvador and extradite one of their citizens, a Salvadoran citizen, so that would be kidnapping. We have to kidnap an El Salvador citizen against the will of his government and fly him back to America. Which would be an unimaginable invasion of El Salvador sovereignty.
Again, this is bullshit. Bukele is claiming that he’d have to “smuggle” Garcia back to the US, while the US is claiming it would have to “kidnap” him? Do they just think everyone is fucking stupid? The US and El Salvador have a written agreement (which is already pretty unconscionable) that El Salvador will house prisoners sent from America at CECOT for $20k/year per prisoner, but according to the Associated Press, the agreement states that the US has discretion on the “long-term disposition” of the prisoners.
In other words, there’s a literal contract that says the US can get these prisoners back. No kidnapping required. No smuggling needed. Just a phone call between Trump and Bukele to arrange the transfer and obey the Supreme Court. Or, hell, they could have done it at yesterday’s meeting.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, Miller lied about that as well. First, he ignores that the Fourth Circuit, including famed conservative judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, insisted that of coursethe district court can order the US to fix a mistake like illegally trafficking someone to a foreign torture camp, ignoring a protection order against sending him to El Salvador.
Having skipped over the Fourth Circuit’s clear ruling, Miller then proceeds to completely misrepresent what the Supreme Court actually said. His claims about “winning” the case are more than just wrong — they’re a deliberate attempt to gaslight the public about a ruling that directly ordered the administration to attempt fix its “mistake”:
So we appealed to the Supreme Court and it said clearly no District Court can compel the president to exercise his Article II foreign powers in any way whatsoever. DOJ called me after the Supreme Court ruling and said: ‘This is amazing we won the case 9-0, we are in excellent standing here.’
So this has been portrayed wrong for 72-hours in the media. They said the most a court can ever compel you to do is facilitate return, which would basically mean if El Salvador voluntarily sends him back we wouldn’t block him in the airport, we would put him back in ICE detention and then he would be deported back to El Salvador or somewhere else.
The Supreme Court said that’s the most the government can be expected to do. So, we won the case, handily. The misreporting on this has been atrocious.
This is also a lie. A flat-out lie. One just needs to read the Supreme Court ruling, which clearly states that the US should work to get him released from the torture camp, not just help him fly back to the US:
The orderproperly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvadorand to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
Two important bits here: first, the Supreme Court makes it clear that the “facilitation” is more than a flight back to the US, but is to seek to get him released from custody in El Salvador. Second, the Supreme Court says directly that Garcia has been “improperly sent to El Salvador.”
But the administration wasn’t done lying. Miller then rolled out an even more audacious claim: that sending Garcia to CECOT wasn’t a mistake at all, despite their own lawyers admitting exactly that in court. Here’s Miller testing this latest bit of revisionist history on Fox News:
He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador. He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador. In 2019 he was ordered deported. He has a final removal order from the United States. These are things that no one disputes. Where is he from? El Salvador. Where is he a resident and citizen of? El Salvador. Is he here illegally? Yes. Does he have a deportation order? Yes.
A DOJ Lawyer, who has been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing, incorrectly, that this was a mistaken removal. It was not. It was the right person sent to the right place.
This is gaslighting taken to new heights. Not only is Miller lying about the “mistake” their own lawyers admitted to, he’s inventing a conspiracy theory about a “saboteur” DOJ lawyer with zero evidence. Miller admits that there was a withholding order on Garcia, barring him from being deported to El Salvador. But Miller claims that once Trump declared MS-13 to be a terrorist organization, that magically dissolved the withholding order, because (he claims) Garcia was a member of that terrorist organization. Fox’s host, Bill Hemmer, who tries to get a word in throughout all this finally asks Miller if he really believes Garcia is an MS-13 member, to which Miller misrepresents things again:
Yes. But here is the thing, Bill. Yes, not only am I convinced of it, not only is El Salvador convinced of it, Bill, he is an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order! So, his only options in life, Bill, his only options in life, are to be deported to El Salvador or to be deported to some other country. That’s it. He has a deportation order!
So Bill, you tell me what country should we deport him to? Tell me? Tell me, please, tell me.
The truth completely demolishes these claims. Immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has put together a useful timeline that exposes the MS-13 allegations as a complete fabrication based on nothing more than a hat and an anonymous tip.
But there’s even more to it than this. The claims that Miller and Bondi made, that “two courts” declared him to be a member of MS-13, are extremely misleading. Looking over the filings in his immigration court hearings does not even remotely support the claim that he’s some sort of violent gang member. Indeed, the report details how his family was targeted by another gang, Barrio 18, because his family ran a somewhat successful pupusa making business out of their home in San Salvador. Barrio 18 kept demanding more and more extortion payouts. When the family was unable to pay the amount demanded, the gang said they would harm Abrego’s older brother, Cesar.
Rather than being an MS-13 member, court records show Garcia’s family desperately tried to keep him away from gangs. When he was just 12 years old, after his brother fled gang threats, Barrio 18 started targeting young Abrego, and the family went out of its way to protect him:
After Cesar left, the gang started recruiting the Respondent. They told Cecilia that she would not have to pay rent any mote if she let him join the gang. [The mother refused to let this happen. The gang then threatened to kill the Respondent, When the Respondent was around 12-years old, the gang came to the home again, telling Cecilia that they would take him because she wasn’t paying money from the family’s pupusa business. The Respondent’s father prevented the gang from taking the Respondent that day by paying the gang all of the money that they wanted. During the days, the gang would watch the Respondent when he went back and forth to school. The members of the gangs all had many tattoos and always carried weapons.
Eventually, the family had enough and moved from Los Nogales to the 10″ of October neighborhood. This town was about 10 minutes away, by car, from Los Nogales. Shortly after the family moved, members of Barrio 18 from Nogales went to the 10″ of October and let their fellow gang members know that the family had moved to that neighborhood: Barrio 18 members visited the house demanding the rent money from the pupusa business again. They went to the house twice threatening to rape and kill the Respondent’s two sisters and threatening the Respondent. The Respondent’s parents were so fearful that they kept the Respondent inside the home as much as possible. Finally, the family decided they had to close the pupusa business and move to another area, Los Andes, about a 15 minute drive from their last residence. Even at this new location, the family kept the Respondent indoors most of the time because of the threats on his life. After four months of living in fear, the Respondent’s parents sent the Respondent to the U.S.
This is the reality the Trump administration is trying to erase: a 12-year-old kid whose family shut down their legitimate business and moved multiple times to protect him from gangs. When that wasn’t enough, they sent him and his brother to the US specifically to keep them away from gang life. And now Miller wants to brand him a terrorist based on… wearing a Bulls hat.
The technical reason Garcia didn’t get asylum? He filed for it too late. He missed the one-year filing deadline after arriving in the US. Yes, the Trump administration is using a paperwork technicality — one that applied to a 12-year-old kid who was fleeing death threats — to justify sending him to a torture camp for the rest of his life.
Despite denying asylum on this technicality, the court still granted him a protection order, recognizing the very real risk to his life if returned to El Salvador. And while Miller keeps touting that an immigration judge “accepted” a police report claiming MS-13 ties, he conveniently leaves out that this was only considered for a bond determination, not as evidence of actual gang membership.
Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”
However, the administration has now taken Stephen Miller’s mythmaking about Garcia being a dangerous “terrorist” member of MS-13 and run with it.
First, DHS put out a nonsense “ICYMI” statement claiming, without evidence, that Garcia is absolutely an MS-13 member and was properly deported to El Salvador:
“I think this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs—home in El Salvador. He was in our country illegally, he is from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and, oh, the media forgot to mention: He is a MS-13 gang member. The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, that he is just a Maryland father. Osama Bin Laden was also a father, and yet, he was not a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists. He should be in this El Salvador prison, a prison for terrorists, and I hope he will remain there.”
Yes, you read that right. DHS is comparing a man whose only “evidence” of gang ties is wearing a Bulls hat to the mastermind of 9/11. This isn’t just dishonest — it’s deranged. And it gets worse.
Not to be outdone in the fabrication department, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem piled on with her own set of completely made-up claims about Garcia:
“This was just one of those examples of an individual that is a MS-13 gang member, multiple charges and encounters with the individuals here, trafficking in his background, was found with other MS-13 gang members—very dangerous person, and what the liberal left and fake news are doing to turn him into a media darling is sickening,”
Every single word of this is a lie, as the Fourth Circuit explicitly found in its ruling:
Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court.
With all these lies now firmly established as their official narrative — that Garcia is definitely MS-13 (despite zero evidence), that sending him to El Salvador was totally intentional (despite admitting in court it was a mistake), and that the Supreme Court didn’t really order his return (despite explicitly doing so) — the administration finally filed its third “status report” with the district court. The filing, submitted an hour after the deadline, doubles down on every single one of these fabrications. It falsely claims the immigration court found Garcia to be MS-13 and argues that Trump’s terrorist designation of MS-13 somehow retroactively voided Garcia’s protection order, despite never making such an argument to an immigration court.
The filing then descends into pure absurdity, simultaneously arguing that the US can’t possibly retrieve Garcia because that would require “kidnapping” him, as Miller has been claiming:
DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.
…while quoting Bukele’s equally nonsensical claim that he can’t return Garcia because that would be “smuggling” a “terrorist”:
I understand that, in response to a question regarding Abrego Garcia, President Bukele said, “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
It is quite something to have, in the same document, and just two paragraphs separated from each other, both arguments that (1) the US seeking to get Garcia back would amount to “forcibly extracting” him and (2) that Bukele returning Garcia to the US would amount to “smuggling a terrorist.”
Remember: no one has asked the US to “forcibly extract” Garcia, nor has anyone suggested Bukele needs to “smuggle” him. There’s literally a contract between the two countries governing these transfers. This isn’t about law or sovereignty — it’s about the Trump administration inventing increasingly absurd excuses to keep an innocent man in a torture camp, all to maintain their strongman facade. It’s pathetic men playacting at being tough guys by terrorizing the powerless.
The implications of what’s happening here cannot be overstated. The administration isn’t just defying both a district court and the Supreme Court — they’re establishing a terrifying new precedent: that they can unilaterally declare anyone a “terrorist,” ship them to an offshore torture facility, and then claim US courts are powerless to intervene because it’s now a “foreign affairs” issue.
Under this definition, as multiple people pointed out, the US government can literally grab anyone off the street, put them on a helicopter, and once they reach international waters, they can do whatever they want to them, and no court could ever intervene.
The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.
CECOT fits this definition perfectly. The only twist is that Trump has placed these concentration camps in another country, creating a paper-thin legal fiction that lets the administration claim that once they’ve disappeared someone across the border, American courts suddenly lose all jurisdiction because it’s now just “foreign affairs” under executive control.
You know those lessons about the Holocaust that ask “what would you have done?” That question is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration is actively building a network of offshore concentration camps and arguing they can disappear anyone into them without due process — and that US courts are powerless to stop them because of “foreign sovereignty.”
The hypocrisy here is staggering. This is the same administration that regularly threatens to violate other nations’ sovereignty — claiming it will annex Canada as “the 51st state” and repeatedly threatening to seize Greenland. But suddenly they’re deeply concerned about El Salvador’s sovereignty when asked to retrieve someone under a contract that explicitly gives the US control over prisoner transfers?
And what happened to Trump, the self-proclaimed “master dealmaker”? The man who claims he can negotiate anything can’t manage a simple prisoner transfer with his ally Bukele? The truth is painfully obvious: they don’t want to bring Garcia back. They want to establish the precedent that they can disappear anyone they want.
The reality is inescapable: this isn’t about law, sovereignty, or national security. The Trump administration, with Stephen Miller as its architect, is deliberately constructing a system of offshore concentration camps and inventing increasingly absurd legal theories to justify them. Why? Because they want the power to disappear people without accountability or oversight.
This case isn’t just about saving Garcia from a torture camp — though that alone should be enough. It’s about preventing the creation of an American gulag archipelago, where anyone the administration declares “dangerous” can vanish forever beyond the reach of US courts. The fact that they’re building this system using such obvious lies and contradictions doesn’t make it less dangerous — it makes it more so. It shows they don’t even feel the need to make their excuses plausible anymore.
Judge Xinis now faces a stark choice: accept these transparent fabrications and help establish a precedent for extra-judicial disappearances, or stand firm against this assault on basic constitutional rights. History is watching.
In a stunning White House appearance that should alarm anyone who cares about constitutional rights, democracy, the rule of law or anything of the sort, Donald Trump and Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele openly defied a Supreme Court order while discussing plans to expand El Salvador’s notorious detention system to imprison US citizens without due process. The meeting, which came just days after Trump admitted the US could retrieve Abrego Garcia from unlawful detention in El Salvador, devolved into the two leaders joking about imprisoning anyone while promoting a chilling vision of “liberation through incarceration.”
We had just posted our last article about how Donald Trump has admitted he could order Abrego Garcia returned to the US (as the Supreme Court has directly instructed the Trump admin to do) before meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. We wondered if reporters would ask both Bukele and Trump about this, and they did. The answers are beyond stupid.
When a reporter asked Trump about his earlier comments saying that if the Supreme Court said to return Garcia to the US then the US government should follow through and have Garcia returned, Trump scolded the reporter:
Why don’t you just say, ‘isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you just say that? Why do yo go over and over and that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You know you have no credibility.
Literally, all the reporter did was ask him about his on-the-record comments from three days ago.
As for the specific question about returning Garcia, Trump passed the question (after also mocking the news station the reporter worked for) to Attorney General Pam Bondi who was there:
Bondi on Garcia: "That's up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That's not up to us."
Bondi responded with a series of false claims about both Garcia and what the Supreme Court actually ordered. Let’s break down each lie.
First, Bondi claimed:
First, and foremost, he was illegally in our country. He had been illegally in our country. And in 2019 two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country. Right now, it was a paperwork… it was additional paperwork had needed to be done.
This is demonstrably false. As the Fourth Circuit noted with regards to Garcia, not only has the government presented no evidence that Garcia is a member of MS-13, but they actually abandoned this claim in court.
Finally, I turn to the Government’s assertion that the public interest favors a stay because Abrego Garicia is a “prominent” member of MS-13 and is therefore “no longer eligible for withholding relief.” …. Whatever the merits of the 2019 determination of the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) regarding Abrego Garcia’s connection to MS-13,the Government presented “[n]o evidence” to the district court to “connect[] Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.”… Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows thatAbrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court.… The balance of equities must tip in the movant’s favor based on the record before the issuing court. An unsupported — and then abandoned — assertion that Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang, does not tip the scales in favor of removal in violation of this Administration’s own withholding order
The Fourth Circuit further noted:
Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”
But Bondi wasn’t done with the lies. She also claimed:
That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if El Salvador wants to return… this is international matters, foreign affairs… if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning: provide a plane.
That’s false. As we noted earlier today, the Supreme Court’s ruling directly says that the administration should “facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” For Bondi to claim this means that if El Salvador “wants” to send him back they can send a plane is simply untrue.
A reporter then asked Bukele the same question, leading to an even dumber response:
COLLINS: Can President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return Garcia?BUKELE: How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it. The question is preposterousTRUMP: These are sick people
Bukele: Are you suggesting I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle… how can I return him to the United States? Like… I smuggle him into the United States, what would you do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.
Reporter: But you could release him in El Salvador?
Bukele: Yeah, but I’m not going to release him. I mean I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists in our country. I mean we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere and you want us to go back, releasing criminals, so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? No. [Laughs] That’s not going to happen.
Trump: [points to reporters] Well, they would love to have criminals released into our country. They would love it. They’re sick. [Points to reporters again] These are sick people.
Again, all of this is nonsense. Garcia is not a terrorist or a criminal. Again, the Fourth Circuit ruling made that clear. Second, there’s no “smuggling” involved. Literally seconds before this exchange, Bondi claimed (incorrectly as a matter of law) that the only thing the Supreme Court ordered them to do was to send a plane if Bukele agreed to release Garcia. So, literally the whole repetitive thing about “smuggling a terrorist into the US” is wrong on both key points: it’s not a terrorist and it wouldn’t be smuggling.
Bukele’s tangent about the “murder capital of the world” is also nonsense. Again, no one has said that Garcia has murdered anyone. Or that he’s violent. Or a criminal. Indeed, the US government had admitted that he’s lived a non-violent, non-criminal life in the US for many years.
All of this is framing basic due process rights as a threat to public safety, a rhetorical trick that autocrats have used throughout history to justify extrajudicial detention. No one should be falling for it here.
As for Trump saying the US media would love it if criminals were released into the US, I should remind you that the person who did the biggest mass release of criminals into the US was Donald Trump when he pardoned all of the convicted January 6th Capitol insurrectionists.
So, let’s be clear about this, because what happened in the White House today is absolute bullshit. The Supreme Court ordered the US government to see what could be done about getting Garcia back, acknowledging (as the US government had originally done, though they’re now trying to retcon in something else) that the government was forbidden by law from sending Garcia to El Salvador.
The US government has a contract with El Salvador that explicitly calls out that the US gets the “decision” on those prisoners’ “disposition.” Thus, the US can easily tell El Salvador to send Garcia back. Bukele’s false claims about “smuggling a terrorist” into the US are unrelated to the issue at hand. Both of them are lying in pursuit of building modern concentration and torture camps.
But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities:
Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."
When reporters later pressed him on this point, Trump didn’t back down. Instead, he openly endorsed the idea of sending US citizens to Salvadoran torture hellholes:
REPORTER: You mentioned you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens but aren't criminal to El Salvador. Does that include US citizens?TRUMP: If they are criminals and hit people with baseball bats, if they rape 87 year old women, yeah. Yeah. That includes them. I'm all for it.
Trump’s sudden concern about “criminals that rape women” rings particularly hollow coming from someone who famously boasted about sexually assaulting women and who was found liable for sexual assault. But the exchange got even more chilling when Bukele introduced his Orwellian concept of “liberation through imprisonment,” which had Trump practically giddy with excitement.
Bukele: They say that we imprisoned thousands. I say we liberated millions […] to liberate that many you have to imprison some.Under Bukele, more than 2% of El Salvador's population is now incarcerated without due process, the highest proportional incarceration rate in the world.
Bukele: Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we liberated millions.
Trump [leaning in and looking excited]: That’s very good!
[Everyone laughs]
Trump: Who gave him that line? You think I can use it? [Laughs]
Bukele: In fact, Mr. President, you have 350 million to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. [shrugs] That’s just the way it works.
Let’s be absolutely clear about what we witnessed today: A foreign dictator stood in the White House and openly suggested that the path to “liberating” 350 million Americans requires imprisoning those deemed problematic — with the obvious implication (given how things have gone so far) being that this should happen without charges, without trials, without due process. And the President of the United States not only agreed, but was enthusiastic about adopting this framework of authoritarian repression.
If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.
For a brief moment last week, Donald Trump acknowledged what everyone already knew — that the US government could bring Abrego Garcia home from the El Salvador torture facility known as CECOT, where he was wrongly sent in what the administration claims was an “administrative error.” But within days, Trump’s administration was back to mocking demands to secure Garcia’s return, refusing to take even basic steps while hiding behind twisted interpretations of both the Supreme Court’s ruling and constitutional authority.
On Friday, we noted that the Supreme Court gave a ruling mostly in support of Garcia, saying that a US court can order the executive branch to “facilitate” a return of Garcia, but then playing word games to say that it can’t “effectuate” such a return, because that’s a matter of foreign policy between the US government and the foreign sovereign of El Salvador. That makes the order sound good, but leaves tons of loopholes, and the administration seems eager to exploit every loophole.
This was even as Donald Trump initially said that if the Supreme Court said Garcia should be brought home, he should obviously be brought home:
Trump: “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court.”
Reporter: “And the lower court as well…?”
Trump: “Oh no, no. I’m not talking about the lower court. I have great respect for the Supreme Court.”
That is, as Garcia’s lawyers quickly told the court, an admission that Trump knows he can and should bring Garcia back to the US.
Yesterday, President Trump confirmed that the United States has the power to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from prison and return to the United States: “If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that. … I respect the Supreme Court.”1 Of course, that is precisely what the Supreme Court did when it ruled that this Court’s injunction “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” Noem et al. v. Abrego Garcia et al., 604 U.S. ____, 2025 WL 1077101, at *1 (Apr. 10, 2025). The Government should be required to comply with the Supreme Court’s order that it “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” by taking all available steps to release and return Abrego Garcia to Maryland.
District Court judge Paula Xinis demanded answers from the government regarding Garcia’s whereabouts and what steps had been taken to get him back to the US. But, when the DOJ lawyer on the case said he couldn’t provide more details, the only consequence from the judge was demanding daily status reports with answers to three specific questions:
(1) the current physical location and custodial status of Abrego Garcia;
(2) what steps, if any, Defendants have taken to facilitate his immediate return to the United States;
(3) what additional steps Defendants will take, and when, to facilitate his return
The DOJ’s response to the court’s demands for information has made it quite clear they have no intention of complying with the judge’s demands and (more importantly) they’re not even interested in trying to bring Garcia back. The first status report merely confirmed Garcia’s location while attempting to wash the government’s hands of responsibility and even the authority to do anything:
It is my understanding based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.
The second status report managed to be even less helpful, answering none of the court’s questions while introducing new, unsubstantiated claims to justify the government’s inaction.
Although Abrego-Garcia has an order of removal issued by an immigration judge, I understand that he should not have been removed to El Salvador because the immigration judge had also granted Abrego-Garcia withholding of removal to El Salvador. However, I also understand that Abrego Garcia is no longer eligible for withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13 which is now a designated foreign terrorist organization
Again, the government itself has already admitted that Garcia was trafficked to El Salvador based on an administrative error. To come back now and try to claim it was legitimate to traffic him this way is beyond obnoxious.
This, also, should be extremely troubling. No one has presented any evidence that Garcia is a member of MS-13. Indeed, the evidence mentioned in the past has been beyond flimsy (basically some other random dude just said Garcia was a member). The US government suggesting that it can just flat out ignore protection orders by declaring someone a member of a group with no due process is just more crazed fascist bullshit.
Meanwhile, as for Trump’s claim that if the Supreme Court says Garcia should be brought back to the US (as it has), he sorta walked that back later in the weekend in the weirdest way possible, by talking about his planned meeting today with El Salvador’s ruthless authoritarian dictator Nayib Bukele… and then saying that the people the US has handed over to Bukele to shove in his concentration camp are under El Salvador’s “sole custody.”
In case you can’t see the image, it’s a Trump Truth Social post saying:
Looking forward to seeing President Bukele, of El Salvador, on Monday! Our Nations are working closely together to eradicate terrorist organizations, and build a future of Prosperity. President Bukele has graciously accepted into his Nation’s custody some of the most violent alien enemies of the World and, in particular, the United States. These barbarians are now in the sole custody of El Salvador, a proud and sovereign Nation, and their future is up to President B and his Government. They will never threaten or menace our Citizens again!
Except, if we’re talking about Garcia, he wasn’t sent to El Salvador under the “alien enemies” act, but under a different authority. And we also know the claim of “sole custody” is bullshit for a variety of reasons (some we already discussed).
More importantly, Trump’s claim about El Salvador having “sole custody” of Garcia is demonstrably false. The Associated Press has published snippets from the agreement between the US and El Salvador that show the US maintains significant control:
“The Republic of El Salvador confirms it will house these individuals for one (1) year,pending the United States’ decision on their long term disposition,” wrote El Salvador’s ministry of foreign affairs in a memo obtained by The Associated Press.
That same report confirms that the US is paying El Salvador $20k per year to house each prisoner and has sent an initial $6 million with another $15 million likely to follow soon. If, as the agreement notes, the US gets to decide “their long term disposition” that certainly means the US can determine that El Salvador needs to send Abrego Garcia back.
Furthermore, the fact that Trump and Bukele are meeting seems like the exact time when Trump — who again just days ago said we should bring Garcia back — can and should just straight up ask Bukele about sending Garcia back. And any political reporter who is in the room is committing journalistic malpractice if they don’t ask Bukele and Trump about this.
But it seems unlikely to happen. In another filing in the district court, the Justice Department put forth the argument that the court simply can’t order the Executive Branch to ask El Salvador to send Garcia back, because that’s “foreign policy” and the exclusive purview of the Executive:
Defendants understand “facilitate” to mean what that term has long meant in the immigration context, namely actions allowing an alien to enter the United States. Taking “all available steps to facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia is thus best read as taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here. Indeed, no other reading of “facilitate” is tenable—or constitutional—here.
This reading follows directly from the Supreme Court’s order. Order, at 2 (holding any “directive” must give “due regard” to the Executive Branch’s exclusive authorities over “foreign affairs”). It tracks longstanding executive practice. Id. at 4 (Statement of Sotomayor, J.) (describing ICE Policy Directive as the “well-established policy” of the United States). And it comports with how the federal courts have understood the outer bounds of their own power. See Reply in Support of Application to Vacate the Injunction, at 5-7 (Sup. Ct.) (No. 24A949) (collecting authorities).
On the flipside, reading “facilitate” as requiring something more than domestic measures would not only flout the Supreme Court’s order, but also violate the separation of powers. The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner. That is the “exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 320 (1936). Such power is “conclusive and preclusive,” and beyond the reach of the federal courts’ equitable authority. Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 607 (2024).
Plaintiffs’ additional relief runs headlong through this constitutional limit.
The DOJ’s sudden concern for constitutional limits would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical. This is the same administration that has repeatedly trampled constitutional rights — from due process to equal protection — in its broader campaign of human trafficking. Now, when asked to help correct its own admitted “administrative error,” it discovers a passionate devotion to separation of powers?
But even setting aside this rank hypocrisy, the DOJ’s argument completely misrepresents what the Supreme Court actually said. The Court’s order was crystal clear:
The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate”Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvadorand to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador
The emphasis on Garcia’s “release from custody in El Salvador” makes it impossible to pretend this was just about domestic procedures. The Court clearly expected the US government to take meaningful action to secure Garcia’s freedom.
But step back from the legal parsing for a moment and consider what the DOJ is really saying here: Even with clear authority under the US-El Salvador agreement, even with millions of dollars in leverage, even after admitting Garcia was wrongly sent there, they are deliberately choosing to leave him in a torture camp rather than simply ask for his return.
This has nothing to do with ordering El Salvador to do anything or to infringe upon their sovereignty. It is telling the US to take actions which are well within its power and control, to ask El Salvador to send him back, which seems well within the agreement the two countries signed.
But, even as Trump has said that’s what should happen, now the Trump admin is saying it won’t even ask El Salvador to do this.
This is pure evil. It made a mistake, human trafficking someone who was legally protected, to a torture concentration camp in another country with no due process. And when asked to correct that admitted mistake, the US government is saying “we won’t even ask” even though it’s clear that they could get him back.
That is sociopathic behavior.
As for the courts, Judge Xinis needs to stop accepting these paper-thin status reports and start demanding that officials with actual knowledge appear in her court immediately. The administration’s continued obstruction makes a mockery of judicial authority.
And when this case inevitably returns to the Supreme Court, as it must, Chief Justice Roberts will face a stark choice about his legacy. He can continue treating this as just another technical legal dispute about executive authority, or he can recognize the horrifying historical parallel unfolding before him: while Nazi Germany deliberately placed its concentration camps outside judicial review, Roberts risks going even further — using the power of judicial review itself to legitimize America’s own offshore torture camps.
The Chief Justice has always been acutely conscious of his place in history. He should consider that his legacy may well be remembered as the jurist who gave constitutional blessing to concentration camps used by the American government to disappear anyone they dislike. No amount of careful legal parsing can obscure that devastating truth.
When most people make a serious mistake that harms someone else, they try to fix it. That’s basic human decency. But when the Trump administration admits to “mistakenly” trafficking someone with protected status to an El Salvador slave labor camp, their response is to mock the judge who ordered them to try to fix it.
Last week, I wrote about the lawless evil of denying due process, focusing on how the administration is human trafficking people (not “deporting” them — deportation requires due process) to El Salvadoran slave labor camps. I used the word “evil” deliberately, as it’s not a word I use lightly. The administration’s gleeful response to their admitted “mistake” only reinforces that conclusion.
That story discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who goes by Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly trafficked by the US. Remember, the US admitted this directly: they knew he had protected status in the US that prevented them from sending him to El Salvador. And did so anyway:
On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error
On Friday, the district court judge overseeing his case made what seems like a reasonable ruling in response to the DOJ’s direct admission of supposed “error.” The judge told them to fix it.
And, normally, when good people make an error, they will do their best to fix it.
But here, something very different happened. First, the DOJ went to court, telling the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals that the district court judge was being ridiculous in suggesting they fix things.
That order is indefensible. Foremost, it commands Defendants to do something they have no independent authority to do: Make El Salvador release Abrego Garcia, and send him to America. That is why Plaintiffs did not even ask the district court for an order directing Abrego Garcia’s return. As Plaintiffs themselves acknowledged, a federal court “has no jurisdiction over the Government of El Salvador and cannot force that sovereign nation to release Plaintiff Abrego Garcia from its prison.” Emergency TRO Mot., ECF No. 2, at 2. That concession is all that is needed to order a stay here. No federal court has the power to command the Executive to engage in a certain act of foreign relations; that is the exclusive prerogative of Article II, immune from superintendence by Article III. But that is exactly what this order does. Indeed, it is the only thing it does—requiring Defendants, on the clock, to try to force a foreign country to take a discrete action. That sort of FRCP 65 diplomacy is simply intolerable in our system of government.
But that was hardly the only thing the government did. El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, first mocked the judge on ExTwitter, posting a gif meme from “The Secret Life of Pets.” While this kind of shitposting is the sort of thing you’d probably expect these days, watching US officials gleefully respond to a foreign nation mocking the US courts is… well… pretty fucked up.
Elon Musk laughing about it is all kinds of fucked up. He’s literally laughing at the fact the administration he works for trafficked an innocent man, who had protected status in the US, to a slave camp in a foreign country, which they admit was a mistake.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s response dripped with contempt for judicial authority: “We suggest the Judge contact President Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” This deliberately mischaracterizes the ruling — the judge isn’t claiming authority over El Salvador, she’s ordering the US government to attempt to fix its own admitted mistake.
Even more telling was Stephen Miller’s response. Miller, the architect of many of the administration’s cruelest immigration policies, called the judge a “Marxist” (based on nothing but her ruling against unconstitutional actions) and sneered that she “now thinks she’s president of El Salvador.” This isn’t just wrong — it’s a calculated attempt to delegitimize judicial oversight of executive power.
Let’s be clear about what the administration is really claiming here: that they can grab anyone — anyone — off the street, and traffic them to a notorious slave labor camp in another country with no due process, where the US is paying the El Salvadoran government for taking these people, and there’s nothing that can be done. Even when the US government admits it made a mistake.
And, again, this is why I pointed out why due process was so central to the rule of law in the first place. If you don’t want to make these kinds of mistakes, you have due process there to make sure that such mistakes don’t happen.
But this administration doesn’t care about mistakes. They don’t care about human trafficking innocent people. They don’t care that they’re sending people likely to their deaths in slave labor camps in another country by “accident.”
That’s just evil.
Even if we’re talking about it as a legal matter, law professor Steve Vladeck points out that the DOJ is full of shit in claiming there’s nothing they can do here:
Federal courts may not have the power to compel the release of an individual from a foreign prison, but they unquestionably have the power to order theU.S. governmentto take whatever steps it can to effectuate the same result.
And that’s all that the judge is doing: telling the US government to fix its own fuckup.
And there are clear precedents for this kind of judicial authority, as Vladeck explains. It’s settled law that someone can be in “constructive custody” even when physically held by another country, if that detention happens at the behest of U.S. officials. The courts have repeatedly affirmed their power to order U.S. officials to take steps to address such situations.
Consider the case of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a U.S. citizen who was being held in Saudi Arabia in 2004. Abu Ali’s parents brought a habeas petition in the D.C. federal district court (naming Attorney General Ashcroft as the respondent), alleging that, although their son was in a Saudi prison, he was being held (and interrogated) only at the behest of the U.S. government as a way of avoiding judicial review in the United States.Judge Bates ruled that, if those allegations were valid, he would have jurisdiction over the habeas petition—not because he could order the Saudi government to release one of its own prisoners, but because he could order the U.S. government to cease doing … whatever it was doing. Bates thus ordered jurisdictional discovery into the extent of the U.S. government’s involvement—at which point, the U.S. government … mooted the case (by indicting Abu Ali on criminal charges and promptly transferring him to U.S. custody in Virginia—indirectly vindicating the central allegation in his habeas petition).1
The Abu Ali case is evocative, but it’s no outlier. Every first-year Civil Procedure student who suffers through “personal jurisdiction” learns that courts can use their power over defendants who are in their jurisdiction to regulate conduct that occurs elsewhere. And so the question in the Abrego Garcia case is not whether Judge Xinis can order President Bukele to do anything (she can’t); it’s whether and to what extent Secretary Noem, who certainlyissubject to Judge Xinis’s jurisdiction, can take steps to effectuate Abrego Garcia’s return.
So here’s the truly horrifying part about this. It would be one thing if Noem/DHS/DOJ tried to get Garcia back and Bukele told them to fuck off. They could then tell the court that, and it just becomes a foreign relations issue between two countries.
No, the horrific and fucking evil part is that the US government is making it clear they won’t even try to fix this error, and in fact they find the whole thing kind of amusing. They ignored basic due process and made a huge, life-destroying “error” in trafficking someone to a slave labor camp in another country when they knew he had protected status in the US. And they won’t even attempt to get the guy back.
And everyone knows if the US wanted him back, they could convince El Salvador to send him back.
But they won’t try. Because they don’t care.
It’s not that Judge Xinis is ordering El Salvador to do something. She’s ordering the US government to do something well within its power. And the US government is laughing at her.
As Vladeck powerfully explains, what’s at stake here goes far beyond one case:
And at a more fundamental level, it would be rather stunning if the law were otherwise. A world in which federal courts lacked the power to order the government to take every possible step to bring back to the United States individuals like Abrego Garcia is a world in which the government could sendany of usto a Salvadoran prison without due process, claim that the misstep was a result of “administrative error,” and thereby wash its hands of any responsibility for what happens next.
That’s exactly what’s happening here. The administration isn’t just failing to fix a mistake — they’re establishing the principle that they can disappear anyone they want into foreign prisons, claim it was an “administrative error,” and face zero consequences. Their mocking response to the judge’s order isn’t just cruelty toward Abrego Garcia — it’s a declaration that they view themselves as completely unbound by the rule of law.
Most people, when they make mistakes, try to fix them. That’s basic human decency. But this administration has made it clear they’re not even willing to try — not because they can’t, but because they see “mistakes” like this as features of their system, not bugs. They’re telling us, through their actions and their sneering response to judicial oversight, that they intend to keep making these “mistakes.” That’s not just cruel or incompetent. That’s a sociopathic level of evil that this history books will remember. Future generations will question how anyone allowed this to happen.
I think lots of people know the kind of person who thinks they’re more clever than they really are. The kind of person who thinks that they can outwit the system by playing stupid games. The kind of person who thinks that this kind of beating the system is because they’re smart. This kind of person is usually viewed as a dipshit. Donald Trump’s DOJ seems to be, as a group, acting like just that kind of dipshit.
Like that overconfident student who thinks they’ve discovered one weird trick to beat the system, the DOJ keeps playing increasingly transparent games in court — making patently ridiculous arguments while acting shocked and offended when judges see right through their obvious nonsense.
It is a form of contempt. Not necessarily in the legal sense. But it is a kind of obvious contempt for the very systems and institutions of our judicial system that they are supposed to be protecting as a part of the constitutional order. And while judges are often willing to give great leeway to bad actors in their courtroom, at some point the outright contempt for the court can turn into something judges will start calling out.
I’m reminded of a college classmate who exemplified this mindset perfectly. He’d spend countless hours finding elaborate ways to game every assignment and test, devising increasingly convoluted schemes to avoid doing the actual work. The irony was that his schemes typically required far more effort than simply completing the assignments properly would have taken. But he sure was proud of the ways he believed he was beating the system.
That same misguided energy now permeates Trump’s DOJ (indeed, I just looked up on LinkedIn if that classmate might now work for the DOJ — thankfully he’s not there). These officials pour tremendous effort into crafting obviously laughable legal arguments, filing misleading declarations, and playing semantic games with court orders — all while seemingly convinced of their own clever brilliance. Just like my former classmate, they’re expending more energy trying to game the system than it would take to actually fulfill their constitutional duties and serve the American people. The result is a particularly toxic form of institutional contempt — not just disregard for the courts, but a sort of smirking certainty that they’re somehow outsmarting the entire judicial system.
It is nearly impossible to keep track of all of the various lawsuits that have been filed against the plethora of illegal actions taken by the Trump administration in the last two months since inauguration (though kudos to folks like Just Security who have been tracking them as best as they can).
The Boasberg case represents a critical escalation in this pattern of contempt. While legal scholars debate what precisely constitutes a constitutional crisis, Corbin Barthold makes a compelling case that we’ve now crossed that threshold. When a federal judge explicitly orders planes carrying deportees to return and the administration simply ignores that order, we’re witnessing something qualitatively different from their usual games.
THE LONG-AWAITED CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS has now arrived. It is time for a court to say so.
On Saturday night, James Boasberg, a federal judge in the District of Columbia, issued a pair of emergency orders. The government, he had just been told at a hastily convened hearing, was removing from the country, without due process, more than a hundred alleged gang members. The planes, he learned, were already in the air. To justify this stunning move, President Trump had issued a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
At around 6:45 p.m., Boasberg orally ordered the planes turned around. “Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” he ruled from the bench. “This is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”
At 7:26 p.m., he issued a briefwritten orderbarring the government from relying on the Alien Enemies Act to remove noncitizens from the country.
The government ignored both orders.
This outright defiance marks a subtle, but notable, departure from the administration’s playbook the past few months. Until now, they’ve preferred more smirking forms of contempt — slow-walking court orders, playing word games with compliance, or burying judges in misleading declarations. But each of these smaller acts of contempt has apparently emboldened them toward more brazen defiance.
A second administration official said Trump was not defying the judge whose ruling came too late for the planes to change course: “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.”
This argument, that the order came too late, is nonsense. But it’s notable how the administration is trying to insist it’s actually obeying orders in court, while doing wink, wink, nod, nod stuff out of court.
The administration’s attempts to characterize this as a routine “deportation” matter represent perhaps their most cynical wordplay yet (and one the media should stop repeating, though that’s a different issue). Deportation is a legal process with established due process rights. What happened here was something far darker: the US government engaging in what amounts to human trafficking, shipping people to El Salvador as forced labor without any due process. The mask slipped entirely when El Salvador’s President tweeted “Oopsie… too late” in response to Judge Boasberg’s order — a tweet that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk both found amusing enough to amplify:
The full scope of what’s happening deserves to be called out directly. Start with the legal sleight-of-hand: The administration has resurrected the Alien Enemies Act, a widely disparaged authoritarian relic that only applies during “a declared war” or “invasion” — neither of which exists. They’re wielding this zombie legislation to deny basic due process rights to people on American soil, shipping them to El Salvador (not even their country of origin) to become literal slave labor — all funded by US taxpayers.
The contempt deepens with their public justification. Without due process requirements, they don’t actually have to prove their claims that these people are gang members. And they can’t — because the claims are false for many of those shipped out. Reports show that many of the deportees have no gang connections at all. Any competent law enforcement official would recognize these allegations as nonsense.
But the most chilling display comes in their response to judicial oversight: when a federal judge attempts to restore basic due process rights, the administration not only ignores his order, but the Secretary of State publicly mocks it while coordinating with their partner in human trafficking. This isn’t just contempt of court — it’s contempt for the entire concept of legal constraints on executive power.
The administration’s response to Judge Boasberg perfectly encapsulates their broader strategy: when the facts aren’t on your side, attack the judge. Their characterization of Boasberg as a “radical left lunatic partisan” would be merely laughable if it weren’t so deliberately misleading. This is the same conservative judge who repeatedly ruled in Trump’s favor in other cases — ordering Hillary Clinton’s emails released, blocking the release of Trump’s tax returns, and limiting disclosures from both the Mueller investigation and the classified documents grand jury.
The contempt here operates on multiple levels: there’s the surface-level dishonesty of painting a conservative judge as a radical leftist, but more insidiously, there’s the implicit message that any judge who dares enforce the law against Trump must be acting from partisan motives. This fits a broader pattern where the administration’s lawyers aren’t just playing games with legal arguments — they’re actively working to undermine the legitimacy of judicial oversight itself.
The Boasberg case may be the most brazen example, but it’s far from isolated. Across multiple courts, judges are increasingly witnessing this administration’s attempts to treat the judicial system like a game they can cleverly exploit. Their contempt generally takes three forms, each more concerning than the last:
First, there’s the malicious compliance playbook — taking court orders so literally they become absurd. The Social Security Administration exemplifies this approach. When Judge Ellen Hollander blocked DOGE from accessing records, interim SSA head Lee Dudek responded by threatening to shut down the entire Social Security system, claiming his entire IT staff were somehow “DOGE affiliates.” This led to an increasingly furious series of clarifications from the judge, culminating in her observation that either Dudek was lying or the DOJ lawyers were.
Second, there’s the strategy of procedural manipulation — exploiting court customs and courtesy to gain tactical advantages. Take the EPA case, where officials used procedural games to try to circumvent judicial oversight. They asked for a routine 24-hour extension on a hearing (which opposing counsel typically grant as a professional courtesy), then used that delay to sneak in actions that would have been prevented by the pending TRO:
Third, we’re seeing increasingly more open defiance of court orders, coupled with attempts to delegitimize any judge who rules against them. The Perkins Coie case perfectly demonstrates this escalation. When Judge Beryl Howell issued a TRO blocking an obviously unconstitutional executive order targeting the law firm for representing Democratic interests, Attorney General Pam Bondi and OMB Director Russell Vought responded with explicit defiance:
The Executive Branch’s position is that Executive Order 14230 is permissible, and that the Court’s order was erroneous. The government reserves the right to take all necessary and legal actions in response to the “dishonest and dangerous” conduct of Perkins Coie LLP, as set forth in Executive Order 14230.
At the same time, the DOJ is trying to disqualify Judge Howell for… “hostility” towards the President, again setting up the idea that any judicial action holding them to account is driven by bias, rather than an actual respect for the Constitution.
The pattern of contempt continues across other cases, each fitting into these three categories of increasingly brazen defiance:
More malicious compliance games appear in the DOGE leadership saga, where pretend DOGE boss Amy Gleason filed a declaration claiming to run the agency even as Trump himself said in his address to Congress that Elon Musk runs it. When called on this discrepancy, Gleason’s response dripped with technically-accurate-but-misleading wordplay: “Elon Musk does not work at USDS. I do not report to him, and he does not report to me. To my knowledge, he is a Senior Advisor to the White House.” The contempt deepened when it emerged that Gleason was simultaneously appointed as an HHS consultant a week after being named DOGE head.
The EPA case shows how procedural games escalate to outright dishonesty. EPA boss Lee Zeldin, fixated on a deceptively edited Project Veritas video, illegally froze a Citibank account, and attempted to launch a grand jury investigation. When challenged in court, DOJ lawyers told Judge Tanya Chutkan they couldn’t provide evidence of any criminal violation because “this Court is not in a position to rule upon whether or not this termination was consistent with the contracts.”
Perhaps most telling is the transgender military ban case, where the administration’s contempt for judicial oversight is laid bare. The DOJ keeps insisting to the judge that there is no ban on transgender service members, while Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth openly declares exactly the opposite:
These examples paint a clear picture of an administration that, like my college classmate from years ago, believes it’s brilliantly outsmarting the system while actually just making itself look increasingly desperate to avoid any accountability. But unlike that student’s academic games, these legal shenanigans carry profound constitutional implications.
What started as wannabe-clever-but-obvious attempts to circumvent court orders has evolved into something far more dangerous: a systematic effort to delegitimize judicial oversight itself. Each time they respond to a court order with malicious compliance, procedural manipulation, or outright defiance, they’re not just showing contempt for individual judges — they’re undermining the very concept of judicial review.
The progression is clear: first came the word games and barely-technically-accurate-but-misleading declarations, then the exploitation of court procedures and customs, and now increasingly open defiance coupled with attempts to paint any judge who enforces the law as politically biased. This is how institutional guardrails get dismantled — not through dramatic confrontation, but through a thousand small acts of contempt that gradually normalize the idea that court orders are merely suggestions to be cleverly evaded.
Trump has already effectively neutered congressional oversight. Now his DOJ appears determined to do the same to the judiciary, treating federal judges like frustrated professors whose rules are just obstacles to be gamed. But unlike my former classmate’s academic adventures, the stakes here aren’t just a passing grade — they’re the continued functioning of our constitutional system of checks and balances.
Judges are starting to catch on, calling out these games with increasing fury. But judicial anger alone won’t be enough. An administration that responds to court orders with winks, nods, and “technically accurate” lies isn’t demonstrating clever lawyering — it’s showing fundamental contempt for constitutional governance itself. Those who shrug this off as mere legal gamesmanship are missing the escalating danger: when government lawyers treat the judicial branch as a system to be cleverly gamed rather than an essential check on power, they’re not just failing their professional obligations. They’re actively participating in the dismantling of judicial review itself.
These officials seem convinced they can keep playing these games forever — or at least until there’s no independent judiciary left to play games with. At some point, judges need to stop writing angry opinions and start issuing contempt charges. And Congress needs to wake the fuck up before it’s too late.
