Sometimes in the Trump administration, doing the easy thing is very hard.
Regarding the celebrated case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the administration should have brought him back to the U.S. months ago and detained him here until it could figure out what to do with him.
After devoting countless man-hours to obfuscating in courtrooms and legal briefs, the administration has finally availed itself of this obvious option. Department of Justice lawyers tried to provide as few details about the government’s handling of the case as possible, and the administration maintained the manifestly implausible position that there was nothing they could do to get El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to return Abrego Garcia.
Sure enough, Bukele, who is eager to kowtow to the White House, now says that, of course, he’d return someone to the U.S. when asked.
All this said, Abrego Garcia was never the father of the year, as the left tried to portray him, and he’s going to face serious charges of human smuggling. The administration will have to prove its case in court (and there’s an argument it’d be better simply to deport him someplace else), but the indictment includes damning facts about one incident we already knew about when Abrego Garcia was pulled over in Tennessee in 2022 with nine other Hispanic males in his vehicle.
According to the indictment, none of them had identification. Abrego Garcia told the police that he was transporting the men from a construction job in St. Louis back to Maryland. Yet, none of the men had construction equipment or luggage. License plate tracking data showed the car, a Chevy Suburban, hadn’t been in St. Louis but in Texas, where the illegal aliens were allegedly picked up. The cargo area of the Suburban had been modified to add a makeshift third seat, and Abrego Garcia had $1,400 in cash on him.
We will presumably learn more about all this at a trial.
Regardless, Abrego Garcia never should have been in the United States in the first place, and he abused the asylum process and benefited from lax enforcement — in both the Obama and first Trump administrations — to stay here. The Trump administration was right to want to deport him. But a lesson of this episode is that sloppiness borne of haste and recalcitrance toward the courts when in error are a waste of time and of political capital, on top of any injustices involved (Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been sent directly to a notorious Salvadoran prison, and he’s probably not the only one we mistakenly sent there).
There is much the administration can still do to move the needle on deportations in full compliance with the laws, and where the laws are inadequate, it should urge Congress to act. This, too, should be an easy call.