Why Trump and Bukele are destroying Kilmar Abrego Garcia's life

Al Jazeera

2 days ago

In March, the United States government deported to El Salvador 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had lived and worked in the US for almost half his life. Little did he know that he would soon be the face of US President Donald Trump's sinisterly exuberant mass deportation campaign.
Married to US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia was detained while driving in Maryland with the couple's five-year-old autistic son, who got to witness his father's capture by the US forces of law and order and has apparently been severely traumatised as a result. In a subsequent court affidavit, Vasquez Sura said her son, who cannot speak, had been 'very distressed' by the 'sudden disappearance of his father', crying more than usual and 'finding Kilmar's work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar's familiar scent'.
Of course, tearing families apart and traumatising children has long been par for the bipartisan course in everyone's favourite 'land of the free', although Trump has certainly made more of a sensational spectacle out of it than his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Anyway, there is nothing like sowing a bunch of fear and psychological trauma in the name of national security, right?
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador along with more than 200 other people, who shared the honour of serving as demonised guinea pigs in the Trump administration's current experiments in sadistic countermigration policy. The deportees were swiftly interned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the notorious mega-prison built by Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's self-described 'coolest dictator in the world'. The facility houses thousands of people arrested under the nationwide 'state of emergency', which was declared in 2022 and shows no sign of abating.
Under the pretence of fighting a war on gangs, Bukele has imprisoned more than 85,000 Salvadorans – over 1 percent of the country's population – in an array of jails that often function as blackholes in terms of indefinitely disappearing human beings as well as any notion of human and legal rights. And now that incoming US funds and deportees have boosted El Salvador's international carceral clout along with Bukele's tough-guy image, there is even less of a rush to end the 'emergency'.
Meanwhile, the case of Abrego Garcia in particular has provided both Trump and Bukele with an extended opportunity to showcase their mutual passion for sociopathy and disdain for the law. As it so happens, Abrego Garcia's deportation to El Salvador occurred in direct violation of a 2019 ruling by a US immigration judge, according to which he could not be deported to his native country on account of the dangers that such a move would pose to his life.
Indeed, Abrego Garcia fled to the US as a teenager, precisely out of fear for his life following gang threats to his family. And although the US government was quickly forced to acknowledge that his deportation in March had occurred 'because of an administrative error', the Trump-Bukele team remains determined not to rectify it.
After all, this would set a dangerous precedent in suggesting that the possibility of recourse to justice does in fact exist, and that asylum seekers in the US should not have to live in terror of being spontaneously disappeared to El Salvador by 'administrative error'.
As per a recent New York Times article exposing the details of the debate within the Trump administration over how to manage the PR side of the Abrego Garcia blunder before it became public, officials from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 'discussed trying to portray Mr. Abrego Garcia as a 'leader' of the violent street gang MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim'.
But a lack of evidence has never stopped folks who are not concerned with facts and reality in the first place. Trump officials have continued to insist on Abrego Garcia's affiliation with MS-13, while the president himself has unabashedly invoked a doctored photograph of tattoos on the man's knuckles. The administration has also relied heavily on the fact that, in 2019, the police department in Prince George's County, Maryland, decided that Abrego Garcia was a gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat, among other oh-so-incriminating behaviour.
To be sure, the frequency with which US law enforcement outfits cite Chicago Bulls merchandise as alleged proof of gang membership would be laughable given the US basketball team's massive domestic and international fanbase – if, that is, such preposterous profiling tendencies did not directly translate into physical and psychological torment for Abrego Garcia and countless other individuals.
In April, the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's return to the US. In addition to thus far failing to comply with that order, the administration has gone to ludicrous lengths to defy a separate order from US District Judge Paula Xinis that it provide details about what exactly it is doing to secure Abrego Garcia's release.
Apparently irked by Judge Xinis's pushiness, Trump administration officials then went with the good old 'state secrets' excuse, which would enable the withholding of information regarding Abrego Garcia's case in order to safeguard 'national security' and the 'safety of the American people', as DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin put it.
Bukele, for his part, has handled the Abrego Garcia situation with a petulant and vengeful machismo befitting the world's 'coolest dictator', taking to X to ridicule the wrongfully abducted and imprisoned man. During an April visit to his partner in crime in the Oval Office in Washington, Bukele made clear to reporters that he would not be lifting a finger on Abrego Garcia's behalf: 'How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?'
Speaking of terrorism, it is worth recalling that, long before the current 'state of emergency' in El Salvador, the US had an outsized hand in supporting right-wing state terror in the country, where the civil war of 1979-92 killed more than 75,000 people.
The majority of wartime atrocities were committed by the US-backed Salvadoran military and allied death squads, and countless Salvadorans fled north to the US, where MS-13 and other gangs formed as a means of communal self-defence. Following the war's end, the US undertook the mass deportation of gang members to a freshly devastated nation, paving the way for continued violence, migration, and deportation and culminating, of course, in the world's coolest dictatorship.
As they say, nothing fuels the consolidation of power and evisceration of rights like a solid 'terrorist' enemy – and at the present moment, Abrego Garcia holds the dubious distinction of serving as that enemy for not one but two sociopathic heads of state. At the end of the day, though, Abrego Garcia is no Osama bin Laden; he is just a random guy whose calculated torment is meant as a warning to anyone who might be feeling too confident in the rule of law.
Trump has already proposed sending US citizens to El Salvador for incarceration, as well – and to hell with any semblance of legality. To that end, the president has proposed that Bukele build more prisons, a project that presumably will not require much arm-twisting.
Now, as the US government goes about annihilating the rights of foreign nationals and legal citizens alike, it is safe to assume that no one is safe.
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.