A top Trump administration official said those demanding due process for a wrongly deported Maryland dad might themselves be accused of “aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.”
Appearing on Rob Schmitt Tonight on Newsmax, Donald Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, suggested critics of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s incarceration in a Salvadoran megaprison might even be committing a federal crime.
He said: “It’s not left and right, It’s not even Republican or Democrat. There’s one line that divides us: Do you love America or do you hate America? It’s really quite that simple.”
Gorka, born in the U.K. to Hungarian parents, suggested in the Tuesday interview that Democrats who argue that Abrego Garcia should be returned to the U.S.—per the Supreme Court’s orders—don’t “love America.”
The former Newsmax host added that those who dissent against the Trump administration’s actions are “on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens on the side of the terrorists.”
He went even further, saying: “And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
Gorka failed to mention that Abrego Garcia’s alleged links to the MS-13 gang—used to justify his deportation—are flimsy at best, based upon a single allegation made in a field interview report from 2019 and a confidential informant telling police he was a member of the gang.
The cop who penned the report was suspended in wild circumstances soon after he interviewed Abrego Garcia, yet his allegation is the only evidence the government has ever produced to support its MS-13 claim.
The El Salvador native had fled his home country in 2011 at age 16 after gang members threatened to kill him. He was arrested while undocumented, found hanging around outside a hardware store looking for day labor work.
He was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without being charged with any crimes.
At his deportation hearing in 2019, ICE stated that he was a danger to the community because he had been detained “in connection with a murder investigation,” and local police had “verified” he was a gang member.
Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and was granted a “withholding of removal” order, a legal form of protection that says the government won’t deport someone to their home country if the person is “more likely than not” to face persecution there.
Since he was picked up by ICE again in March this year, the Department of Justice has not presented any evidence in court showing gang affiliations.
Government lawyers have even “abandon[ed]” their earlier position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community,” a federal appeals court found.
But despite, this, top government officials continue to brand him as a danger and a “terrorist.”
A 60 Minutes investigation discovered that at least three-quarters of the 250 men shipped to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) had no criminal records at all. The facility is notorious for human rights abuses.
The Trump administration has admitted it deported Abrego Garcia after an “administrative error,” but still refuses to bring him home.
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