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 Ice agents in March and sent without due process to Cecot, an enormous 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.
