4 hours ago

The case against Kilmar Ábrego García is a study in sadistic absurdity | Moira Donegan

In a way, you could think of the brief stint that Kilmar Ábrego García spent in a Tennessee jail after his return from a Salvadorian prison camp in June as a kind of protective custody. Ábrego, a Maryland resident who had never been charged with any crime either in the US or in his native El Salvador, became a symbol of the Trump administration’s ambitiously sadistic anti-immigration efforts when he was kidnapped by I agents in March and sent without due process to Cecot, a massive prison in El Salvador from which few detainees are ever released, as a result of what representatives for the Trump immigration authorities called an administrative error. Ábrego became a symbol for the several hundred men who had been deprived of their liberty and deported to the distant foreign prison without due process and in defiance of both American and international law.

It was only after extensive public pressure on the issue – including visits to Cecot and demands to see Ábrego from prominent Democratic politicians, including Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland senator – that Ábrego was returned to the US. The Trump administration ginned up a fake, face-saving excuse for his return, claiming Ábrego needed to be tried for alleged crimes in the US. But that was never anything but a cover, a lie to avoid admitting that they were bringing him back under political pressure and that such pressure could make them cave again. Still, Maga does not forgive Ábrego for his innocence; its adherents decided to make an example of him. Now, released from jail on those trumped-up and unproven allegations, Ábrego has been arrested again by Ice. This time, the Trump administration says it plans to deport him to Uganda – a country he has never been to – as part of a new third-country deportation scheme recently blessed by the supreme court.

The Trump administration has continued to pursue Ábrego, in spite of his obvious innocence, because they see the outcry over his accidental arrest and deportation as an unacceptably embarrassing stain on their anti-immigrant agenda. His arrest exposed the cruelty, randomness and essential malignant incompetence of Trump’s vast, unaccountable, reckless, violent and now extremely monied anti-immigrant armed corps: that they arrested an innocent man and deported him to potentially eternal exile and imprisonment in a country he had fled without notice, process, or legal authority left many Americans – and not only migrants – terrified of what might happen to their neighbors, their loved ones or themselves. The plain injustice of his case briefly served to unify anti-Trump forces, sway public sentiment against the crackdown and provoke an uncharacteristic degree of visible public action by elected Democrats. To the Trump administration, this could not stand. Now, they have set about punishing Ábrego for his role as proof of their own malignant idiocy.

Without proof, and without much plausibility, Ábrego has been alleged by the Trump administration to be the author of various crimes and malfeasances. They admit that deporting him was a mistake, but also want us to believe that he is the sort of person who should be deported – a human trafficker, in one fantasy; a gang leader, in another. That there is no proof for these allegations is beside the point: the point is that the Trump administration is claiming authority over reality itself, claiming the ability to decide what is true and what is false, and to reclassify every migrant – and in particular every Latino male – as a criminally dangerous threat that must be eliminated.

Ábrego, then, must be guilty because the Trump administration arrested him, and because they can do no wrong. He must be guilty because he is a migrant, and innocence and immigration are mutually exclusive. He must be guilty, too, because his case made them do something that they did not want to do: admit a mistake, face public pressure, reverse an action, and – worst of all – show weakness. And he must be guilty because he has become a symbol of all the immigrants they plan to deport, all the Americans whose rights they plan to trample on, all the past and future victims of their program.

Shortly after his re-arrest by Ice on Monday, a judge ordered that the Trump administration not deport Ábrego to Uganda, as it planned. Because the Trump administration has willfully defied court orders in order to carry out deportations in the past, the judge who addressed the justice department lawyer representing the White House was explicit. “Your clients are absolutely forbidden from removing Mr. Abrego from the United States,” she told them. “You understand this?” The government lawyer said he did, though this does not mean that the order will be followed.

Ábrego now finds himself suffering the worst of a Kafkaesque absurdity, in which the law is arbitrary, malignant, unreliable, sadistic and totally divorced, in its rationale or result, from anything he has actually done. His predicament is not a little like that of Joseph K, the protagonist of The Trial, who finds himself arrested and imprisoned for a crime that is not revealed to him, and petitioning endlessly against the unfeeling representatives of a remote, cold and pitiless authority. He was selected for the Trump machine’s sadism at random, by the force of their own racist incompetence; it is still unclear whether he will ever manage to escape it.

The injustice of Ábrego’s situation transcends his personal character – indeed, part of the absurdity is how indifferent the Trump administration is to what kind of man Ábrego might be. But from what we can see ourselves, he seems like a man capable of great moral feeling. On the steps of the courthouse on Monday, just moments before he headed inside to what was certain to be his re-arrest by Ice, Ábrego addressed a crowd of well-wishers in Spanish. “Regardless of what happens here today in my Ice check-in,” he said, “Promise me this: that you will keep fighting, praying, believing in dignity and freedom. Not only for me; for everyone.”