In a normal nation governed by the rule of law — not Donald Trump’s America, that is — the government’s mistaken deportation of a Maryland father to a Salvadoran gulag, in violation of a federal immigration judge’s 2019 order, might have been easily resolved.
Lo! Just four days after the Supreme Court last Thursday unanimously ordered the government to “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release back to the United States, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele was due in the Oval Office. Bukele could have simply given the sheet-metal worker a lift back home to his wife and three children, all U.S. citizens, as part of the Salvadoran entourage.
That’s not what happened on Monday, of course. The casually clad Bukele, self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” instead arrived “with just the Miami club promoter’s clothes on his back,” as Jon Stewart quipped. Then we saw the sorry spectacle of two strongmen presidents, Trump and Bukele, side by side in the Oval Office declaring themselves powerless to restore Abrego Garcia’s freedom. They smiled smugly, both in on the joke. Besides, they claimed without evidence, he’s a terrorist.
In truth, Abrego Garcia and hundreds of other men were sent to El Salvador’s own Hotel California, the Terrorism Confinement Center, without due process — charges, hearings, evidence, juries or judges. The administration called them “the worst of the worst,” though several media investigations found that few of the deportees, including Abrego Garcia, had criminal records other than immigration law infractions, and fewer yet had ties to gangs that Trump has designated as terrorist groups.
Abrego Garcia’s case is especially egregious. Team Trump admitted in court that he shouldn’t have been shipped to El Salvador, the one country that the federal order in 2019 said he must not be sent to, given the “clear probability of future persecution.” In fact, that federal immigration judge found, Abrego Garcia and his family were gang victims, repeatedly extorted under threat of death in El Salvador. The first Trump administration didn’t appeal that 2019 order, just as the second hasn’t.
No wonder then that another judge, U.S. Dist. Court Judge Paula Xinis, ordered the government to report daily on Abrego Garcia’s well-being and its attempts to return him, so far to no avail. “Nothing has been done. Nothing,” she protested Tuesday, before ordering an extraordinary two-week inquiry into the administration’s “stunning” defiance. Meanwhile, the administration said in a court filing that if somehow Abrego Garcia did return, it would detain and deport him again.
As bad as all this is, the Trump-Bukele bro-fest in the Oval Office all but confirmed that there is worse to come. The two men joked — joked — first in private (we know thanks to Bukele’s post of the video) and then openly to reporters that El Salvador should build more megaprisons to house undesirable U.S. citizens — “homegrowns,” Trump said a couple of times, so pleased by his branding. “You gotta build about five more places,” he told Bukele, “Yeah, the next phase,” Bukele agreed. Aides cracked up.
Despite the yucks, Trump was serious: He’s said before that he’d love to ship citizen “criminals” to foreign jails. and he repeated his wishes on Tuesday on Fox News. Such citizen deportations would violate another Supreme Court decision, from 1936, not to mention basic expectations of American justice.
“Trump is halfway to making America a police state” was the headline in the Financial Times the next morning. The only debatable word there is “halfway.” Of the other two supposedly co-equal branches of government, Trump has cowed Congress and now is openly defying federal courts, including the Supreme one.
This is confirmation of a constitutional crisis, the likes of which the nation has never seen, except in other lands. More evidence: On Wednesday, another federal district judge, James E. Boasberg, ruled that “probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt” for its “willful disregard” of his March order that it return the planes ferrying migrants to El Salvador.
Monday’s performance in the Oval Office was the most chilling since Trump and Vice President JD Vance ganged up on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Feb. 28. And now the office’s garish new bling — all the gold ornaments, wall medallions, cherubs, frames and end tables — is a metaphor for Trump’s desecration of that sanctum. Trump’s amen choir of aides, including Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, piled on with further lies about Abrego Garcia. For instance: The whopper from the execrable Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, that the Supreme Court had ruled 9-to-0 in the administration’s favor, which conservative legal authority Ed Whelan quickly lambasted on X as an “outrageous misrepresentation.”
Talk about gaslighting. The Supreme Court said this about the lower federal court’s order to return Abrego Garcia: It “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.”
That seems clear enough to just about anyone not on Trump’s payroll, however cautiously worded the justices’ two-page order was. And yet, with Trump dug in and seemingly enjoying the controversy — the better to distract from his calamitous trade war — it is hard to see how Abrego Garcia will be returned anytime soon. Supreme Court expert and pundit Jeffrey Toobin was blunt: “I don’t think he’s coming back, basically ever,” he said on CNN.
Democrats, laser-focused on criticizing Trump about the economy and skittish about immigration issues where he enjoys more support, are finally rousing to the constitutional crisis. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen landed in El Salvador on Wednesday, and others, including Rep. Robert Garcia of Long Beach, also plan trips. But the ultimate pressure must come from the voters, like those who assailed Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley at a town hall in Iowa this week.
When Grassley insisted he wouldn’t help Abrego Garcia “because that’s not a power of Congress,” the attendees guffawed. They know better.
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