An UPDATE on Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia

Will You Be the Next To Disappear? Thanks to YOUR protests, maybe not.

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has returned to the United States, thanks to you.

Months of relentless protests and the hard work of dedicated immigration advocates¹ have brought Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia home.

But his road to freedom is just beginning.

Image sourced from YouTube video by CASA a nonprofit organization dedicated to stopping oppression.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, upon announcing his return, after denying his due process since April, immediately slandered him in front of television cameras and national reporters:

"Over the past nine years, Abrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring," Bondi said. "They found this was his full time job, not a contractor. He was a smuggler of humans and children and women."

His attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, hit back:

"Now, after months of delay and secrecy, they’re bringing him back, not to correct their error but to prosecute him. Due process means the chance to defend yourself before you're punished, not after. This is an abuse of power, not justice."

Bondi has ditched that quaint notion of using words like “allegedly” to describe Garcia, thus tainting future jury pools. This will end up being her problem, too, as these kinds of statements will surely be brought up on appeal if she somehow manages to snag a conviction.

More likely than a conviction, though, is that Garcia will sit in a detention facility a little longer and quietly be released for lack of evidence during some other Trump regime distraction (I doubt it’s a coincidence that he was released during the Musk v. Trump Duel of Dunderheads).

I first wrote about ICE’s kidnapping and abduction of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia here:

Will You Be the Next To Disappear?

By now, most of you have heard the story.

If you haven’t, here’s the one sentence summary:

Kilmar was abducted by ICE and thrown into the notorious El Salvadoran 40,000-inmate concentration camp, CECOT, with no due process of any kind for the crime of returning home from work while Latino. No judge, no jury, not even a hint of an immigration judge.

Photo of the CECOT concentration camp in Tecoluca, El Salvador by La Prensa Gráfica, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons; the press often refers to CECOT as “sprawling.” In truth, stuffing 40,000 inmates into a facility this size is worse than how we treat caged chickens.

El Salvador has a rich history of extra-judicial killings, deplorable prison conditions, and criminally corrupt and autocratic governments.

After months of detainment and a lot of yelling from people like you, he’s on his way home (we think).

Regarding Bondi’s accusations, I’ll quote Heather Cox Richardson’s perfect summary from last night:²

The indictment has issues. Abrego Garcia is the only person named in the “conspiracy,” and the investigation into it began only in April, after the courts ordered the administration to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. The indictment is based on a 2022 incident in which Abrego Garcia was stopped in Tennessee for speeding with eight passengers in his vehicle. He told police they were construction workers and was neither ticketed nor charged. While the indictment alleges that Abrego Garcia lied to the officer by not revealing he was coming from Texas, the referral report says he told the officer he was coming from Houston, Texas.

Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5 in Nashville, Tennessee, noted that the chief of the criminal division for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville, Ben Schrader, resigned on May 21, saying: “It has been an incredible privilege to serve as a prosecutor with the Department of Justice, where the only job description I’ve ever known is to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons.” Williams notes that May 21 is the same day as Abrego Garcia’s indictment.

So, yes. He’s returning to the U.S. But the assault on his reputation continues.

And hey, maybe, but very doubtfully, he’s what Bondi says he is.

But refusing to give him due process makes all of us vulnerable to the same treatment. The point of due process isn’t to hug criminals. It’s to at least make a token effort to keep innocent people from going to prison, or worse, to El Salvador, Sudan, Libya, or one of the other countries that the Trump regime has identified as prison countries.

To borrow loosely, again, from the famous poem by Martin Niemöller:³

First they came for the Venezuelan man
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Venezuelan.

Then they came for the Salvadorans
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Salvadoran.

Then they came for the Chinese
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Chinese.

Then they came for the journalists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a journalist.

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Thanks for reading! Stay safe.

Footnotes

1. Advocates like Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, his attorney, who has been working behind the scenes to free Kilmar since April.

2. Richardson, Heather Cox. 2025. “June 6, 2025.” Substack.com. Letters from an American. June 7, 2025. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-6-2025.

3. “Holocaust Memorial Day Trust | First They Came – by Pastor Martin Niemöller.” 2020. Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. April 30, 2020. https://hmd.org.uk/resource/first-they-came-by-pastor-martin-niemoller/.