A Department of Homeland Security official on Monday compared Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant whom the Trump administration admitted it deported in error, to Osama bin Laden.
Speaking to Fox News, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said Monday that “this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs, home in El Salvador,” referring to Abrego Garcia’s detention in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses.
“He was in our country illegally, he’s from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and oh, the media forgot to mention, he is an MS-13 gang member,” McLaughlin said. “The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, he’s just some Maryland father. Well, Osama bin Laden was also a father, and yet he wasn’t a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”
DHS official Tricia McLaughling compares Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Obama bin Laden pic.twitter.com/YuBjGWxryz
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2025
Abrego Garcia is neither a terrorist nor a member of MS-13. In fact, an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that his life would be in danger if he were to return to El Salvador. In contrast, bin Laden co-founded Al Qaeda, responsible for several terrorist attacks around the world and thousands of deaths, including 2,996 people in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
The fact that the Trump administration continues to lie and call Abrego Garcia a gang member and terrorist with no evidence to justify its defiance of a Supreme Court ruling to facilitate his return, is an egregious miscarriage of justice and slander of an innocent man. Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, is married to a U.S. citizen, and is the father of an autistic child. He deserves to return to the U.S., but the Trump administration doesn’t want to admit that it’s wrong.
The post Trump’s DHS Says Wrongly Deported Man Is Basically Osama bin Laden appeared first on New Republic.
