DHS Arrests Kilmar Abrego Garcia With Plans To Ship Him To Uganda, Because He Refused To Plead Guilty To Fake Human Trafficking Charges
The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration's shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated ICE check-in and announced they're just going to send him to Uganda.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was originally swept up by ICE and sent to El Salvador's infamous CECOT prison, despite have a clear court order that he could not be deported to El Salvador.
Garcia is from El Salvador. Although he'd clearly like to remain in the States with his family, if he had to be removed from the US, he'd prefer to be sent to nearby Costa Rica, which has promised to grant him status, rather than left to rot in a prison overseen by the self-proclaimed world's coolest dictator" (or an American prison on totally trumped up charges that don't pass the laugh test).
Garcia has been yanked around by the Trump administration, which has vehemently refused to take even the smallest loss in the War on asylum seekers, even if doing so might have resulted in larger wins later. This yanking around extended to a federal court, where DOJ prosecutors and DHS legal advisors repeatedly tested the patience of multiple presiding judges.
After weeks of claiming it was impossible to retrieve Garcia from the Salvadoran hellhole the administration had sent him to, Garcia was suddenly returned to the United States. While that may have been good news, the rest of it wasn't. The government still wanted to make Garcia pay for refusing to accept his unlawful punishment silently. It threw the book at him upon his return, claiming Garcia was nothing more than a human trafficker - something it based solely on a 2022 traffic stop where Garcia wasn't even cited, much less arrested for any criminal activity whatsoever. Two separate courts found the entire claim by the US government preposterous and ordered him released from jail.
Abrego Garcia is getting hit with this administration's version of the trial tax." He's faced with two options, neither of which would be a satisfactory outcome for a man still proclaiming his innocence and has already been subjected to this government's cruelty.
The federal government is trying to forceKilmar Abrego Garciato accept a guilty plea or face deportation to Uganda, his attorneys claimed in a filing on Saturday.
The Salvadoran man, who was wrongly deported in March before being brought back to the United States to face human smuggling charges, was released from criminal custody in Tennessee and sent back to Maryland on Friday.
After Abrego Garcia declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to the human smuggling charges, his attorneys say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed them that he could bedeported to Ugandaand ordered him to report to their office in Baltimore on Monday.
This is just more pure cruelty from a president who's made that his presidential brand. Costa Rica would be the obvious choice when the only other option is Uganda, one of the poorest nations in the world. But Costa Rica is only an option if Garcia pleads guilty to fake charges and serves time in prison. If he wants to remain a free" man, he must subject himself to being involuntarily displaced yet again, unceremoniously deposited in one of the worst places this cruel and unusual administration can think to send him.
The DOJ, of course, refuses to address the allegations made by Abrego Garcia's lawyers. Instead, its statement says nothing about the pressure it's applying. Nor does it explain why the government has decided on Uganda as the final destination for Garcia should he refuse to give it the guilty plea it sorely needs to justify its heinous actions after the fact. And rather than actually dealing with this appropriately, they just decided to arrest him and announce the plan to send him to Uganda. It's pretty clear that the choice of Uganda is about further punishing Garcia for existing and trying to exercise his own rights.
This came a few hours after Abrego Garcia filed a lawsuit to try to block ICE from doing this.
All of this is so blatantly obvious retaliation for making the Trump administration look bad. They wanted quiet acquiescence as they illegally human trafficked hundreds of people to a foreign gulag, and now they're taking it out on one guy for daring to ask to have his basic rights respected. It's a sad show from a pathetic Trump administration that is simply unable to handle anyone pointing out their mistakes.