President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele sat in the Oval Office like a pair of smarmy abusers and openly mocked U.S. courts that have ordered the return of a wrongfully deported Maryland man.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father and sheet metal worker, was deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador due to what the Trump administration admitted in court was an “administrative error.” You don’t have to care about him or his family – though anyone with a hint of morality would – but you darn well better care about a U.S. president openly defying a U.S. Supreme Court order while yukking it up in the White House with a South American leader who dubbed himself “world’s coolest dictator.”
Abrego Garcia, 29, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Maryland on March 12 and swiftly dispatched to what amounts to a gulag in El Salvador. That was in open defiance of an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling that Abrego Garcia could not be removed to El Salvador because he would face persecution.
Before I say more about this gross miscarriage of justice, it’s worth reminding folks that this is the president Republicans wanted. And until they say otherwise, I’ll assume this dictatorial behavior is also what they want.
Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported. Trump will do nothing to get him back.
The administration has claimed Abrego Garcia is a gang member, but a federal judge has already said there’s no evidence to support that claim. On April 10, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court order requiring the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.
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Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “To this day, the Government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”
It has been clear that Trump and his cronies plan to defy the order to return Abrego Garcia. That plan was cemented on April 14 in the Oval Office when not-at-all-cool dictator Bukele said: “How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
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That does not make our big, tough American president look very tough.
In fact, it looks like a dictator waltzed into the Oval Office and told the American people that their weenie president is powerless to retrieve a wrongfully deported man from a small South American country.
Trump seems to be using El Salvador to help him defy courts
The only other possibility is that Trump and Bukele are in cahoots and are jerking the U.S. Supreme Court around while flaunting their laws-don’t-apply-to-us attitudes.
If that’s the case, then it appears the U.S. government can simply disappear a person legally residing here with a wife and child who are are U.S. citizens and then fart around as if federal court orders are meaningless. And if THAT’S the case, then the idea of America is pretty much shot.
Trump is paying the El Salvadoran government $6 million to take alleged gang members whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounds up without apparent due process.
At one point during their White House meeting, Trump said to Bukele: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
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That means the plan is to start shipping full-on U.S. citizens, anyone the Trump administration deems a “criminal,” to Salvadoran gulags.
And that, to say the least, should scare the apple pie out of you.
If Trump can defy the Supreme Court, it’s curtains for America
Again, you should absolutely care about the Maryland man presently enduring God knows what in a South American prison.
And you should care equally about the other seemingly innocent immigrants getting “accidentally” rounded up and dispatched to that same prison.
But even if you don’t care about what happens to immigrants, I strongly suggest you think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts. I want you to ponder that slippery slope and whether your idea of America involves a king who answers to nobody dispatching American citizens he happens to dislike.
Because that Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president showed, in no uncertain terms, that we’re perilously close to a scenario where Trump just does as he pleases. If that’s what Republicans want, they should have the guts to stand up and say so, because this is what they asked for.
But for everyone else, it’s time to stand up and shout “Hell no!” right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk
