Kilmar Ábrego García got just one weekend with his family before ICE again detained him. His rearrest is also a reminder of the dangers that could face any one of us
Maryland dad Kilmar Ábrego García got just one weekend with his family after more than 160 days apart before the Trump administration again detained him and separated him from his loved ones for possible deportation to imminent danger.
Ábrego García – whose wrongful purging and subsequent torture at a Salvadoran megaprison sparked widespread outcry over the Trump administration’s due process violations and mass deportation policy – had barely been freed from a Tennessee jail on Friday when officials informed his lawyers that they would seek to deport him to Uganda – a country he’s never stepped foot in or has any ties to – after he refused to accept a coerced plea deal.
With the cloud of yet another possible separation hanging over their heads, Ábrego García and his loved ones nevertheless reunited in Nashville to tears and shouts of joy from friends and supporters.
“The video posted by CASA — the immigrant advocate and legal aid organization that has provided aid to Abrego and his family — opens to cheers and clapping from Abrego’s family as he walks through a doorway. The cheers then clear into chants of ‘Si se pudo,’ or ‘It was possible,’ as Abrego heads straight from the door of what appears to be a hotel room toward his smiling wife and children,” NBC Washington reported. “As Abrego reaches his wife and children, the child in his wife’s arms stretches toward Abrego. He lifts the child into a hug, then bends down to also hug his wife.”
Early the following Monday, Ábrego García and his U.S. citizen wife, Jennifer, appeared at the Baltimore ICE office. But they weren’t alone. The couple were surrounded by scores of supporters, including Rep. Glenn Ivey (MD-04) and a number of clergy, Religion News Service reported. Before entering the ICE office, Ábrego García addressed the large crowd, and, despite knowing the imminent dangers that lay in the building behind him, left supporters with a message of hope and solidarity.
“To all those families who have been separated or threatened with family separation, I want to tell you something,” he said. “God is with us. God will never leave us. God will bring justice to all the injustice we are suffering.” Religion News Service reports that after his remarks, clergy members from the Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist and Unitarian Universalist traditions prayed over the Maryland father.
“As you are caught in the gnashing teeth of fascism and cruelty, as lies are shouted about who you are and who your family is, as betrayals are whispered to you, claiming that you are alone, know that you walk in truth, know you are never alone,” said Rabbi Ariana Katz. “You and your family are encircled under the wings of the Holy One.”
Ábrego García then entered the building. “Less than an hour later, Abrego’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, informed the crowd that his client had been taken into ICE custody,” the report continued. His attorney said agents would not say why they were detaining the father. “Suddenly, the singing shifted into a chant of ‘Shame! Shame! Shame!’”
But in a significant ruling that same day, Judge Paula Xinis – who in April had ordered Ábrego García’s immediate return from the CECOT megaprison in a decision that the administration fought all the way to the Supreme Court – barred officials from again purging him until at least October. “Xinis’ hearing in October will likely feature testimony from administration officials so she can determine whether they properly followed their own procedures or acted lawfully,” CNN reported.
“Your clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States,” Judge Xinix told the Justice Department. “That judge had actually been holding him in the Tennessee jail to keep ICE from grabbing him,” Dave Zirin noted at The Nation. “It was legal protective custody against our own unlawful government.”
Judge Xinis’ latest ruling is a small measure of justice for a father and union brother who has become a symbol of the administration’s relentless, vindictive persecution of immigrant contributors and its willingness to violate court orders and personal freedoms in order to ramp up that agenda. And, so much of the administration’s obsessive targeting of the Maryland father stems from it simply not being able to admit that his initial purging to CECOT was completely wrongful. Recall that a judge appointed under the first Trump administration thoroughly vetted his background.
“The Trump administration has continued to pursue Ábrego, in spite of his obvious innocence,” columnist Moira Donegan writes at The Guardian, “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,” Donegan continued.
ICE’s complete disregard for the judicial process – recall that a whistleblower alleged that Trump-confirmed judge Emil Bove suggested saying “f-ck you” to judges – demonstrates how the administration sees deportation as immediate retribution, not due process. It also showcases the risks facing all Americans, because if you deprive due process to one person, you open the door to denying due process to all of us.
And, Trump has already publicly threatened to do to American citizens what he did to Ábrego García. We’re now seeing him promise to occupy other American cities to further his power grab as legal claims from unjustly detained U.S. citizens are piling up. In just one example, mass deportation agents are being accused of racially-profiling a Latino U.S. citizen boy with special needs, including holding him at gunpoint. His mother said that once agents reunited them, one told her, “Oh, we just confused you with somebody else, but look at the bright side, like, you’re going to have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school.”
Most parents or children likely don’t consider that exciting in the least. They just want to be able to go to school without risking family separation.
“This is about due process that every person in the United States deserves due process under the Constitution, regardless of whether they are a citizen, a temporary resident, a student on a visa,” Rep. Robert Garcia (CA-42) said in April. “I am not defending the man, I’m defending the rights of this man to due process,” Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen also said at the time. “And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we do jeopardize it for everybody else.”
