Abrego Garcia Should Be Returned to US

COMMENTARY

The Trump administration’s refusal to demand the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — an immigrant from El Salvador whom U.S. officials mistakenly deported to a prison in his native country — is illegal, unconstitutional, immoral and unAmerican. 

If the deportation without due process of law of a man who has never been convicted or even charged with a crime is allowed to stand, it will transform the U.S. justice system into a corrupt instrument of government overreach, oppression and injustice. 

The Constitution’s Bill of Rights states that no one in the U.S. should “be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” Due process gives everyone the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a jury trial.

It protects us all. 

Abrego Garcia, 29, fled El Salvador and entered the U.S. illegally at age 16, saying a gang threatened to kill him to extort payments from his family. He is married to a U.S. citizen and the two are raising three children in Maryland. He is entitled to the same human rights as all of us and shouldn’t be locked up indefinitely.

Abrego Garcia held a valid work permit from the Department of Homeland Security until he was arrested March 12 and deported to El Salvador, along with nearly 240 other immigrants. The Supreme Court ruled April 19 that the government must temporarily halt the deportation of additional alleged immigrant gang members to give them a chance to challenge the action.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described those already deported as “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters [and] predators.” But Bloomberg News found that about 90% of the deportees have no U.S. criminal records.

Prosecutors and other government officials can accuse anyone of anything.

But accusations are meaningless unless proven in court. If that were not the case, anyone government officials chose to punish would be vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment without a trial.

The use of this approach in the Abrego Garcia case is dangerous and should terrify everyone in our country.

Administration officials clearly must fear that if Abrego Garcia gets the due process rights he is legally required to receive, the government will have to give the same rights to other immigrants it is deporting. This would slow the administration’s efforts to deport as many immigrants as possible as quickly as possible for political gain.

Yes, Mr. President, all immigrants and U.S. citizens enjoy rights and protections under our Constitution.

The Trump administration alleges without credible evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter of the MS-13 criminal gang in New York, even though he has never lived there. He and his attorneys deny he belonged to any gang or terrorist group. 

Even though the Supreme Court has upheld a lower court ruling ordering the U.S. government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration has not done so. A federal appeals court refused April 17 to overturn a district court order that said federal officials must testify about whether they are complying with the order to “facilitate” the release, with lawyers arguing over what that requires.

As an unauthorized immigrant, Abrego Garcia was arrested in 2019. However, a federal immigration judge ordered him released and barred the U.S. from sending him back to El Salvador because of serious death threats the judge concluded Abrego Garcia faced.  

The Trump administration has admitted in a court filing that deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in violation of the order by the immigration judge was an “administrative error” — but refuses to correct the error by bringing him back to the U.S. and says he will never return. 

Saying “oops, too bad, we can’t do anything” is unacceptable.

The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $15 million to imprison deportees. Our government is legally required to admit and correct its errors to the fullest extent possible. 

It is absurd, immoral and inhumane to put forth no effort to return Abrego Garcia and to believe that El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who recently met with Trump, would refuse a request by the American president to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. 

Bukele sneered and smiled when he told reporters during his meeting with Trump that he would not release Abrego Garcia. Disgracefully, administration officials aren’t demanding Abrego Garcia be returned, despite the Supreme Court ruling in his favor. This legal conundrum leaves Abrego Garcia stuck in an international quagmire.

To preserve our freedoms and system of due process under the law, all Americans should demand our government bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., where he can either go free or stand trial if prosecutors believe they can convict him of a crime. If El Salvador officials believe he committed a crime there, they should put him on trial — not hold him indefinitely, as if he has been sentenced to life in prison.  

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., has taken up Abrego Garcia’s cause, traveling to El Salvador and meeting with him April 17. But Bukele said afterward that he would not release Abrego Garcia. The White House criticized Van Hollen for the trip, writing in a statement that he “has firmly established Democrats as the party whose top priority is the welfare of an illegal alien MS-13 terrorist.” 

No one wants to bring terrorists and other criminals into our country.

But simply calling Abrego Garcia a terrorist and criminal without evidence or a conviction does not make him one, nor does it make America a stronger democracy. It weakens our democracy and all our country has stood for and against for nearly 250 years.

Abrego Garcia’s continued detention makes a mockery of our constitutional rights and the claim in the Pledge of Allegiance that America is a nation of “liberty and justice for all.”

Democrats, Republicans and the administration should work together on a bipartisan basis to demand that this wrongly deported husband and father be brought back to the United States.  

Bring him home. 

A. Scott Bolden is an attorney, NewsNation contributor and former chair of the Washington, D.C., Democratic Party. He can be found on X.