We know all too much about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an apparently formerly quiet construction worker who immigrated to this country without papers when he was 16, on the run from a violent gang in El Salvador. Though he entered the United States illegally, he is married to an American citizen with whom he has American children, is an asylum applicant who was granted legal residency and the ability to legally work here by a judge in 2019, and regularly showed up for his annual check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
We certainly know that it would be better for Garcia, for his family, and oddly enough for the nation if we knew nothing at all about him.
Instead, he has apparently randomly become a scapegoat buffeted about within the cruelty and incompetence of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Though he is without any evidence accused by the White House of being a member of the MS-13 gang, his actual criminal ties are on the receiving end of a San Salvador gang, Barrio 18, that tried to extort money from his mother’s pupusa cart business. The gang tried to force his elder brother to join it, or he would be killed. His mother sent that brother, Cesar, to the U.S. Then the gang started to follow Kilmar Garcia when was about 12, and later threatened to kill him. His mother then sent Kilmar to the U.S. as well. The judge who granted him residency said that the evidence showed Garcia would face violence if he ever were to return to El Salvador.
Yet the White House plucked Garcia from obscurity by doing just that, deporting him to El Salvador in March, through what it later described as “an administrative error.” He had at the time never been accused of a crime either here or in his Central American homeland, and yet ended up in the Terrorism Confinement Center in the nation’s capital.
It’s a multi-million dollar legalistic soap opera, what has happened in the months since Garcia was finally sent back to the States after the error.
He is accused by federal authorities of human trafficking, which sure sounds like a bad thing; others say he apparently drove fellow day laborers around the country looking to pick up jobs. Legal filings show that he was once accused of domestic violence by his wife, who later said that she wanted him back because the incidents were prompted by their extreme poverty and asylum-seeking stressors.
She certainly stands by him now, as do an unlikely consortium of supporters ranging from immigration activists to libertarian pundits. After dozens of legal maneuverings and incarceration, of false statements to the press and on social media, the administration continues to use Garcia as a propaganda punching bag, and as a pawn in the game of deflecting public focus from everything from the Epstein files to tariff-driven inflation over to the White House’s massive get-tough policies on immigrants.
The latest administration ploy was asking him to plead guilty to human trafficking and then be deported to the only relatively non-authoritarian country in Central America, Costa Rica. Garcia’s lawyers said that since he wasn’t guilty, he wouldn’t cop the plea.
So the White House now says it will deport him to Uganda, the East African nation, with which he has zero ties.
A person is not a litmus test for Americans’ views on immigration. He is a person. To the White House, Garcia, or the picture they paint of him, is a useful tool for appearing to be tough. Federal officials playing this game would not even agree with the plain fact, which is, as Republican senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said, “The administration won’t admit it. But this was a screw-up.”
They don’t think that the screw-up is a sign of the cruelty and incompetence of immigration policies that are merely playing to their base rather than staying rooted in logic and a push for reform immigration laws. If the White House wanted solutions to the problem of so many illegal immigrants in the country, they would be working tirelessly with Congress, the only body that can produce legislation that can solve the problem. As Republicans in the House face upcoming mid-term elections, all this White House grandstanding rather than hard work on immigration is not going to serve them well.
