Yo Soy Abrega Garcia
A shabby case of presidential defiance
Yesterday a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit expressed deep impatience with the Trump administration for dragging its feet on returning one American - wrongly deported and dumped in a Salvadoran prison - back home where he belongs.
The dystopian case of Kilmar Armando Abrega Garcia ought to anger and offend every US citizen. The Trump administration wrongly targeted this immigrant man for rough deportation, moving him from Maryland to El Salvador and oblivion.
“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote on behalf of the panel. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
This case should shock and enrage every American citizen. If this can happen to one man in Maryland, it can happen to you or me - or any one of us.
The questions many of us have been asking about this shabby case of presidential defiance were already begging horrible possibilities. (Would it turn out that Abrego Garcia was now “unavailable” for any visitation because he has been tortured or worse? Was he now dead, his remains dumped in a shallow grave?) The news photos published this morning of Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland actually sitting with Abrego Garcia (albeit surely stage-managed by the prison) were somewhat reassuring, at least relieving some of these darkest worries.
The fact is that what has happened to Abrego Garcia, his abduction and rendition to a prison cell in El Salvador - without due process - means it could happen to me or to you. The very fact that it has occurred to one citizen, to one lawful immigrant who has the same constitutional rights we all do, insults the principles of due process and habeus corpus that we are all guaranteed. But reckless defiance - and the worry and fear such official behavior engenders - seems always to be the point of the Trump administration’s brutish behavior and low regard for our Constitution and our Bill of Rights.
Also read this from the Times columnist David Brooks this morning. He believes there’s an urgent need now for an organized national movement pushing back against our heedless White House…
“What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.”
Pray for Abrega Garcia and his family. Pray for your family, for our country, and for us all. We are all Abrego Garcia now.
America’s civil emergency has now arrived.
This is not OK.
I appreciate your comment so much! I am becoming more terrified that our lives and the liberty we have had as citizens will disappear. At my age (80) I may not be affected as adversely as the majority of our citizens, but my mental health is becoming very fractured. I depend on the postings from friends like you to keep me somewhat centered. My knowledge of past horrors (the Holocaust, etc.) was never something I feared would be the fate for the USA. However, I now feel that the security I once felt was misplaced and perhaps naive. There seems there are too few in Congress who will make the effort to stand up to the bullies in the current administration. Without such an effort like the one led by our own Sen. Howard Baker and others against the Richard Nixon/Watergate nightmare, we are now doomed to fall to the coming oligarchy. I grieve for Abrego Garcia, his family, and all others who may be caught in the same net of vengeance and hatred. “From whence cometh our help?”. 342637
I suppose I should quit sharing unflattering posts about DT. This could happen to any of us.