Trump Admin’s New Defense For Accidentally Sending Abrego Garcia To Salvadoran Torture Camp: We Meant To Do That
The Trump administration has settled on a terrifying new legal theory: they can declare anyone a terrorist," ship them to an offshore torture camp without due process, and courts can do nothing about it because it's foreign affairs." This isn't speculation - it's the actual argument they're making to justify their accidental" trafficking of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador's CECOT facility.
After initially admitting in court this was an administrative error," the administration has pivoted to an even more disturbing stance: they meant to do it all along, and they can do it to anyone. And they'll just fucking lie about everything to pretend this is all perfectly normal and acceptable.
We mentioned some of this in our story yesterday about Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele's shameful and dark press conference in the Oval Office, in which both of them denied the ability to bring Garcia back to the US (with Pam Bondi falsely claiming that the only thing the Supreme Court told them to do was send a plane if Bukele chose to release him, and Bukele bizarrely claiming that he couldn't return Garcia because it would require smuggling a terrorist" into the US, none of which is true).
The implications here are fucking terrifying. The administration is essentially arguing that once they declare someone a terrorist" - based on evidence" as flimsy as wearing a Chicago Bulls hat - they can disappear that person to an offshore torture facility with no due process and no judicial oversight. And they're making this argument while simultaneously giving the middle finger to both a district court and the Supreme Court.
This authoritarian power grab became crystal clear when Trump advisor Stephen Miller started spewing his laughably false claim that the Supreme Court ruling about Garcia was actually a win for the administration. He'd been practicing this bullshit all morning in multiple media appearances, including a surprisingly contentious interview on Fox News.
Stephen Miller claims on Fox News that returning the Maryland father who was wrongly deported to El Salvador would constitute a "kidnapping" and "invasion of El Salvador's sovereignty.""He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador," Miller lies. "This was the right person sent to the right place."
So, I want to correct that. I hate to do it, Bill. I have to correct you on every single thing you just said, because it was all wrong.
First, we won the Supreme Court case, clearly, 9-0. A District Court judge said unconscionably that the president and his administration have to go into El Salvador and extradite one of their citizens, a Salvadoran citizen, so that would be kidnapping. We have to kidnap an El Salvador citizen against the will of his government and fly him back to America. Which would be an unimaginable invasion of El Salvador sovereignty.
Again, this is bullshit. Bukele is claiming that he'd have to smuggle" Garcia back to the US, while the US is claiming it would have to kidnap" him? Do they just think everyone is fucking stupid? The US and El Salvador have a written agreement (which is already pretty unconscionable) that El Salvador will house prisoners sent from America at CECOT for $20k/year per prisoner, but according to the Associated Press, the agreement states that the US has discretion on the long-term disposition" of the prisoners.
In other words, there's a literal contract that says the US can get these prisoners back. No kidnapping required. No smuggling needed. Just a phone call between Trump and Bukele to arrange the transfer and obey the Supreme Court. Or, hell, they could have done it at yesterday's meeting.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, Miller lied about that as well. First, he ignores that the Fourth Circuit, including famed conservative judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, insisted that of course the district court can order the US to fix a mistake like illegally trafficking someone to a foreign torture camp, ignoring a protection order against sending him to El Salvador.
Having skipped over the Fourth Circuit's clear ruling, Miller then proceeds to completely misrepresent what the Supreme Court actually said. His claims about winning" the case are more than just wrong - they're a deliberate attempt to gaslight the public about a ruling that directly ordered the administration to attempt fix its mistake":
So we appealed to the Supreme Court and it said clearly no District Court can compel the president to exercise his Article II foreign powers in any way whatsoever. DOJ called me after the Supreme Court ruling and said: This is amazing we won the case 9-0, we are in excellent standing here.'
So this has been portrayed wrong for 72-hours in the media. They said the most a court can ever compel you to do is facilitate return, which would basically mean if El Salvador voluntarily sends him back we wouldn't block him in the airport, we would put him back in ICE detention and then he would be deported back to El Salvador or somewhere else.
The Supreme Court said that's the most the government can be expected to do. So, we won the case, handily. The misreporting on this has been atrocious.
This is also a lie. A flat-out lie. One just needs to read the Supreme Court ruling, which clearly states that the US should work to get him released from the torture camp, not just help him fly back to the US:
The order properly requires the Government to facilitate" Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
Two important bits here: first, the Supreme Court makes it clear that the facilitation" is more than a flight back to the US, but is to seek to get him released from custody in El Salvador. Second, the Supreme Court says directly that Garcia has been improperly sent to El Salvador."
But the administration wasn't done lying. Miller then rolled out an even more audacious claim: that sending Garcia to CECOT wasn't a mistake at all, despite their own lawyers admitting exactly that in court. Here's Miller testing this latest bit of revisionist history on Fox News:
He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador. He's an illegal alien from El Salvador. In 2019 he was ordered deported. He has a final removal order from the United States. These are things that no one disputes. Where is he from? El Salvador. Where is he a resident and citizen of? El Salvador. Is he here illegally? Yes. Does he have a deportation order? Yes.
A DOJ Lawyer, who has been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing, incorrectly, that this was a mistaken removal. It was not. It was the right person sent to the right place.
This is gaslighting taken to new heights. Not only is Miller lying about the mistake" their own lawyers admitted to, he's inventing a conspiracy theory about a saboteur" DOJ lawyer with zero evidence. Miller admits that there was a withholding order on Garcia, barring him from being deported to El Salvador. But Miller claims that once Trump declared MS-13 to be a terrorist organization, that magically dissolved the withholding order, because (he claims) Garcia was a member of that terrorist organization. Fox's host, Bill Hemmer, who tries to get a word in throughout all this finally asks Miller if he really believes Garcia is an MS-13 member, to which Miller misrepresents things again:
Yes. But here is the thing, Bill. Yes, not only am I convinced of it, not only is El Salvador convinced of it, Bill, he is an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order! So, his only options in life, Bill, his only options in life, are to be deported to El Salvador or to be deported to some other country. That's it. He has a deportation order!
So Bill, you tell me what country should we deport him to? Tell me? Tell me, please, tell me.
The truth completely demolishes these claims. Immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has put together a useful timeline that exposes the MS-13 allegations as a complete fabrication based on nothing more than a hat and an anonymous tip.
But there's even more to it than this. The claims that Miller and Bondi made, that two courts" declared him to be a member of MS-13, are extremely misleading. Looking over the filings in his immigration court hearings does not even remotely support the claim that he's some sort of violent gang member. Indeed, the report details how his family was targeted by another gang, Barrio 18, because his family ran a somewhat successful pupusa making business out of their home in San Salvador. Barrio 18 kept demanding more and more extortion payouts. When the family was unable to pay the amount demanded, the gang said they would harm Abrego's older brother, Cesar.
Rather than being an MS-13 member, court records show Garcia's family desperately tried to keep him away from gangs. When he was just 12 years old, after his brother fled gang threats, Barrio 18 started targeting young Abrego, and the family went out of its way to protect him:
After Cesar left, the gang started recruiting the Respondent. They told Cecilia that she would not have to pay rent any mote if she let him join the gang. [The mother refused to let this happen. The gang then threatened to kill the Respondent, When the Respondent was around 12-years old, the gang came to the home again, telling Cecilia that they would take him because she wasn't paying money from the family's pupusa business. The Respondent's father prevented the gang from taking the Respondent that day by paying the gang all of the money that they wanted. During the days, the gang would watch the Respondent when he went back and forth to school. The members of the gangs all had many tattoos and always carried weapons.
Eventually, the family had enough and moved from Los Nogales to the 10'' of October neighborhood. This town was about 10 minutes away, by car, from Los Nogales. Shortly after the family moved, members of Barrio 18 from Nogales went to the 10'' of October and let their fellow gang members know that the family had moved to that neighborhood: Barrio 18 members visited the house demanding the rent money from the pupusa business again. They went to the house twice threatening to rape and kill the Respondent's two sisters and threatening the Respondent. The Respondent's parents were so fearful that they kept the Respondent inside the home as much as possible. Finally, the family decided they had to close the pupusa business and move to another area, Los Andes, about a 15 minute drive from their last residence. Even at this new location, the family kept the Respondent indoors most of the time because of the threats on his life. After four months of living in fear, the Respondent's parents sent the Respondent to the U.S.
This is the reality the Trump administration is trying to erase: a 12-year-old kid whose family shut down their legitimate business and moved multiple times to protect him from gangs. When that wasn't enough, they sent him and his brother to the US specifically to keep them away from gang life. And now Miller wants to brand him a terrorist based on... wearing a Bulls hat.
The technical reason Garcia didn't get asylum? He filed for it too late. He missed the one-year filing deadline after arriving in the US. Yes, the Trump administration is using a paperwork technicality - one that applied to a 12-year-old kid who was fleeing death threats - to justify sending him to a torture camp for the rest of his life.
Despite denying asylum on this technicality, the court still granted him a protection order, recognizing the very real risk to his life if returned to El Salvador. And while Miller keeps touting that an immigration judge accepted" a police report claiming MS-13 ties, he conveniently leaves out that this was only considered for a bond determination, not as evidence of actual gang membership.
In fact, the Fourth Circuit completely demolished these attempts to paint Garcia as a gang member:
Even then, the Government's evidence" of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government's claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie," and (2) a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13's Western' clique in New York-a place he has never lived."
However, the administration has now taken Stephen Miller's mythmaking about Garcia being a dangerous terrorist" member of MS-13 and run with it.
First, DHS put out a nonsense ICYMI" statement claiming, without evidence, that Garcia is absolutely an MS-13 member and was properly deported to El Salvador:
I think this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs-home in El Salvador. He was in our country illegally, he is from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and, oh, the media forgot to mention: He is a MS-13 gang member. The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, that he is just a Maryland father. Osama Bin Laden was also a father, and yet, he was not a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists. He should be in this El Salvador prison, a prison for terrorists, and I hope he will remain there."
Yes, you read that right. DHS is comparing a man whose only evidence" of gang ties is wearing a Bulls hat to the mastermind of 9/11. This isn't just dishonest - it's deranged. And it gets worse.
Not to be outdone in the fabrication department, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem piled on with her own set of completely made-up claims about Garcia:
This was just one of those examples of an individual that is a MS-13 gang member, multiple charges and encounters with the individuals here, trafficking in his background, was found with other MS-13 gang members-very dangerous person, and what the liberal left and fake news are doing to turn him into a media darling is sickening,"
Every single word of this is a lie, as the Fourth Circuit explicitly found in its ruling:
Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government abandon[ed]" its position that Abrego Garcia was a danger to the community" at the hearing before the district court.
With all these lies now firmly established as their official narrative - that Garcia is definitely MS-13 (despite zero evidence), that sending him to El Salvador was totally intentional (despite admitting in court it was a mistake), and that the Supreme Court didn't really order his return (despite explicitly doing so) - the administration finally filed its third status report" with the district court. The filing, submitted an hour after the deadline, doubles down on every single one of these fabrications. It falsely claims the immigration court found Garcia to be MS-13 and argues that Trump's terrorist designation of MS-13 somehow retroactively voided Garcia's protection order, despite never making such an argument to an immigration court.
The filing then descends into pure absurdity, simultaneously arguing that the US can't possibly retrieve Garcia because that would require kidnapping" him, as Miller has been claiming:
DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.
...while quoting Bukele's equally nonsensical claim that he can't return Garcia because that would be smuggling" a terrorist":
I understand that, in response to a question regarding Abrego Garcia, President Bukele said, I hope you're not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it. The question is preposterous."
It is quite something to have, in the same document, and just two paragraphs separated from each other, both arguments that (1) the US seeking to get Garcia back would amount to forcibly extracting" him and (2) that Bukele returning Garcia to the US would amount to smuggling a terrorist."
Remember: no one has asked the US to forcibly extract" Garcia, nor has anyone suggested Bukele needs to smuggle" him. There's literally a contract between the two countries governing these transfers. This isn't about law or sovereignty - it's about the Trump administration inventing increasingly absurd excuses to keep an innocent man in a torture camp, all to maintain their strongman facade. It's pathetic men playacting at being tough guys by terrorizing the powerless.
The implications of what's happening here cannot be overstated. The administration isn't just defying both a district court and the Supreme Court - they're establishing a terrifying new precedent: that they can unilaterally declare anyone a terrorist," ship them to an offshore torture facility, and then claim US courts are powerless to intervene because it's now a foreign affairs" issue.
Under this definition, as multiple people pointed out, the US government can literally grab anyone off the street, put them on a helicopter, and once they reach international waters, they can do whatever they want to them, and no court could ever intervene.
Here's what the Holocaust Memorial Museum defines as a concentration camp":
The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.
CECOT fits this definition perfectly. The only twist is that Trump has placed these concentration camps in another country, creating a paper-thin legal fiction that lets the administration claim that once they've disappeared someone across the border, American courts suddenly lose all jurisdiction because it's now just foreign affairs" under executive control.
You know those lessons about the Holocaust that ask what would you have done?" That question is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration is actively building a network of offshore concentration camps and arguing they can disappear anyone into them without due process - and that US courts are powerless to stop them because of foreign sovereignty."
The hypocrisy here is staggering. This is the same administration that regularly threatens to violate other nations' sovereignty - claiming it will annex Canada as the 51st state" and repeatedly threatening to seize Greenland. But suddenly they're deeply concerned about El Salvador's sovereignty when asked to retrieve someone under a contract that explicitly gives the US control over prisoner transfers?
And what happened to Trump, the self-proclaimed master dealmaker"? The man who claims he can negotiate anything can't manage a simple prisoner transfer with his ally Bukele? The truth is painfully obvious: they don't want to bring Garcia back. They want to establish the precedent that they can disappear anyone they want.
The reality is inescapable: this isn't about law, sovereignty, or national security. The Trump administration, with Stephen Miller as its architect, is deliberately constructing a system of offshore concentration camps and inventing increasingly absurd legal theories to justify them. Why? Because they want the power to disappear people without accountability or oversight.
This case isn't just about saving Garcia from a torture camp - though that alone should be enough. It's about preventing the creation of an American gulag archipelago, where anyone the administration declares dangerous" can vanish forever beyond the reach of US courts. The fact that they're building this system using such obvious lies and contradictions doesn't make it less dangerous - it makes it more so. It shows they don't even feel the need to make their excuses plausible anymore.
Judge Xinis now faces a stark choice: accept these transparent fabrications and help establish a precedent for extra-judicial disappearances, or stand firm against this assault on basic constitutional rights. History is watching.