In this undated image, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia confirms her husband is pictured above at the El Salvador concentration camp Trump sent him to.
(U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland via AP)Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland husband and father, was illegally deported to a notorious concentration camp in El Salvador on March 15th with hundreds of other immigrants who were denied due process. This was despite the fact he is a legal resident and had a 2019 protection order barring his deportation to his home country of El Salvador due to the risk of serious personal harm by gangs there. Even so, after admitting they made a mistake, the cruel and incompetent Trump regime has immediately appealed a federal judge's ruling that Kilmar must be returned to the United States by April 7th at 11:59 pm. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt even released a statement seemingly mocking the ruling and claiming the judge had no authority to issue it.
Despite Trump regime claims Kilmar has ties to the criminal gang MS-13, his lawyer asserts he does not have a criminal record in the United States or outside of it and the government has provided absolutely no evidence. To add to this, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis also found, “the record reflects that Abrego Garcia was apprehended in Maryland without legal basis ... and without further process or legal justification was removed to El Salvador.” So a man with legal status and no criminal record in the United States was denied due process and shipped directly to the country a protective order from 2019 explicitly stated he was not to be deported to due to concerns about his safety.
Unsurprisingly, the Trump regime cares about as much for the law as they do about facts. In a trolling statement released immediately after Judge Xinis' ruling, genuinely terrible person and pathological liar Karoline Leavitt asserted, “We are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” Her truly despicable and infantile response of essentially "too bad, so sad" to such an egregious violation of the law just reinforces what so many Americans already know about Trump and his policies - they are all about cruelty and fear, as well as the punishment of those they disagree with and have demonized. There is no higher purpose.
The actions taken by the Trump regime should send a chill down the spine of all Americans, as due process is a constitutional right available to those in the United States regardless of whether or not they are a citizen. In this case, Kilmar actually had a protected legal status. How much of a leap is it that the Trump regime will soon try to do the same to green card holders and then American citizens it deems to be the "enemy from within" Trump said were the greatest threat to America during the 2024 campaign? Not much of one considering he already illegally used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to get us to this point.
We must also not forget there were hundreds of others with Kilmar when he was illegally sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador. They included legal asylum seekers and others whose stories Americans do not know about yet. Even if all of them are gang member (and they are not), every single one of them should be returned to the United States for a fair and open hearing on their legal status. Wrongs such as these done in the name of the American people can and should be brought to light and remedied to best of a free people's ability to do so.