Kilmar Abrego Garcia is currently — as of the last court filing and the Trump regime’s word — residing in one of the worst prisons in the world in El Salvador. He’s there because of a mistake, lawyers representing the Trump administration have said. It was a mistake in the micro sense, but Garcia’s deportation and confinement in a Salvadoran hellhole are no accident: this is about punishment and pain.
Today, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) will travel to El Salvador to try to get Garcia back. This is something pretty brave in terms of American politics — he is standing up for an undocumented immigrant in Garcia, thereby doing what Republicans think will help them. You see, the Trump regime and vehemently anti-immigrant ghouls like Stephen Miller believe it’s in their electoral interest to have Democrats defending people like Garcia — who because of his skin color and where he’s from they naturally associate with being a bad guy. But Van Hollen doesn’t appear to care about any of that and is simply doing the right thing.
Remember that? Remember when, regardless of party or whether it was politically advantageous, lawmakers would occasionally do what was right? Like John McCain telling one of his supporters that Barack Obama was a good man, or Obama being courteous and respectful to Trump. That all seems like a thing of the past now that the American right is engaged in a zero-sum, point-scoring game that rushes us ever closer to democratic decline. Meanwhile, people like Garcia get caught in the middle.
Legal immigrants who have played by the rules are also getting the shaft under the Trump regime. Not only are Elon Musk and his pals lying about them getting Social Security benefits, as I reported two weeks ago for Rolling Stone, but now, Musk’s DOGE goons have classified legal immigrants as dead in a ham-fisted effort to cut them off from benefits they aren’t receiving.
This will result in many legal immigrants not being able to get on-the-books jobs, access their bank accounts, and many of the other things that require having a Social Security number. The apparent hope is that by making them even more of second-class citizens, these immigrants will deport themselves.
Meanwhile, Garcia has been sent to a place that is life-threatening for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Garcia was granted some level of protective status by an immigration judge because he had fled El Salvador, fearing gangs like MS-13. Now, he’s in one of the worst prisons in the world right alongside of all of those gang members, and people like Trump, Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Karoline Leavitt and congressional Republicans are both lying about Garcia being a member of MS-13 and simultaneously saying, Fuck it. He deserves to be there anyway because he came here illegally.
That’s some of where we’re at, but unfortunately there’s a lot more where all this comes from. To unpack this distressing case I caught up with Arturo Dominguez, who runs Decolonized Journalism, which you should immediately subscribe to. Arturo has a piece out today that explains how Garcia has gone from a random immigrant from El Salvador to the face of the Trump administration’s illegal and unethical immigration plans.
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