Innocent Father or MS-13 Gang Member?

Plus: Taibbi takes on the Truth Czar, a wild tale about Ayn Rand’s estate, and more…

Here’s what we know to be true: Abrego Garcia had been in the U.S. since 2012, living under protected legal status—withholding of removal, which protects him from deportation back to El Salvador due to likelihood that he’d be persecuted there—since 2019, married to a U.S. citizen, with a 5-year-old autistic child. He has no criminal record here. He worked in construction for years, soliciting in Home Depot parking lots, and finally got a job as a sheet metal apprentice about a year ago. On March 12, he was stopped and informed by ICE agents that his status had changed. On March 15, he “was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” say attorneys with the Justice Department. Now he’s at CECOT, the notorious prison in rural El Salvador, touted by President Nayib Bukele as an option for the U.S. government to send deportees.

Abrego Garcia’s wife is suing the Trump administration and asking a judge to order the U.S. government to get the government of El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia.

Here’s what’s claimed by each side: In court documents from 2019—seven years after entering the country, once stopped by law enforcement—Abrego Garcia says his family had attracted the attention of local gangs (Barrio 18) in El Salvador because they ran a successful pupusa business while he was growing up. His parents reportedly went to great lengths to protect their sons from being handed over to those gangs. The family moved over and over again to try to escape extortion.

Abrego Garcia’s case was compelling to a judge, who dinged him for failing to make an asylum claim within the one-year deadline but ended up granting him withholding of removal—protection from being deported back to El Salvador, described by some as “asylum lite“—because of a credible threat of persecution there.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, says he is a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, which has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Abrego Garcia’s lawyer claims the gang allegation is false and that they are due to “a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland,” per reporting by The Atlantic. (“During questioning, one of the men told officers that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him, filings show.”) More on this claim here, and here, from one of the lawsuits.

There are two issues worth separating here: Whether he is a dangerous gang member, and whether he is here illegally and thus legally able to be deported. Many appear to be conflating the two, since claiming the first makes the second an easier pill to swallow.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Abrego Garcia “an illegal criminal who broke our nation’s immigration laws.”

“These are vicious criminals,” Leavitt continued. “This is a vicious gang, and I wish that the media would spend just a second of the same time you have spent trying to litigate each and every individual of this gang who has been deported from our country as the innocent Americans whose lives have been lost at the hands of these brutal criminals.”

From my vantage—someone broadly in favor of more immigration, done legally; more pathways to citizenship as well as more work authorization granted; someone who wasn’t keen on the Biden-era border chaos—the White House is being irresponsible at best, deceitful at worst, by spreading the idea that Abrego Garcia is a gang member when we don’t have sufficient evidence to establish that fact. By the looks of it, he was not supposed to be deported to El Salvador. It’s possible that, given Bukele’s crackdown on gang activity, he no longer had a credible fear of persecution in his home country. (Then his status would need to have been changed.) It’s possible that he was not telling the truth about the pupusa business and the gang extortion. It’s possible that he did have gang ties. But it’s also possible that the Trump administration screwed up and deported the exact type of person our asylum system is designed to protect, someone well on his way to making a good life in the U.S.

Taibbi sticks it to the Truth Czar: “The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech,” journalist Matt Taibbi said before Congress yesterday, in a hearing on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which was meant to counter so-called foreign disinformation and misinformation but had pivoted to targeting American social media users during the Biden administration. “The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves. They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what’s truth.”

More Taibbi on the collapse of the American censorship regime here:

QUICK HITS

• Absolutely wild piece from The Atlantic on Leonard Peikoff, who inherited Ayn Rand’s whole estate, and who may be in danger of losing it all due to a caretaker-turned-wife who has possibly taken advantage of him. (“I would let her step on my face if she wanted,” Peikoff once said of Rand, with whom he was extremely close.)
• “In recent weeks, China has been practicing unusual maneuvers off its southern coast involving three special barges. The vessels have linked up one behind another, forming a long bridge that extends from deeper waters onto the beach,” reports The New York Times. “The vessels’ debut suggests that China’s People’s Liberation Army may be a step closer to being able to land tens of thousands of troops and their weapons and vehicles on Taiwan’s shores.”
• Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) just filibustered for 25 hours, breaking the record formerly held by Strom Thurmond. “These are not normal times in our nation,” said Booker. “And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.” The kind of odd thing about it all is that he wasn’t filibustering in favor of or against a specific bill; there’s no clear action item, nor is there much fixation on the actual contents of the speech (with the exception of a few lefty pundits who seem to like what they’re hearing), just the stunt.
• “Elon Musk’s candidate faced a resounding loss in a Wisconsin judicial race despite the world’s richest man pouring millions into the campaign, while Republicans avoided upsets in two critical US House seats in Donald Trump’s home state of Florida,” reports Bloomberg. “Taken together, Tuesday’s special election outcomes came to a draw. Republicans couldn’t break the 4-3 liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, while Democrats fell short in their longshot bids to win either of two heavily Republican House seats, which would’ve complicated the GOP’s efforts to advance Trump’s tax cut plan through Congress.”
• Tariffs-as-solution-to-fentanyl-crisis continues to be absurd framing:

• Pivot to Alaska:

Associate Editor, Reason

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