Will You Be the Next To Disappear?

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s only crime was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat

Imagine picking up your five-year-old son from school and coming home from a hard day’s work as a sheet metal worker.

When you pull up to the driveway, armed men in a dark Suburban SUV with tinted windows jump out of their vehicle and roughly push you toward your front door, demanding you hand your kid to your wife.

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

Then, they lock you in chest and ankle chains and transport you to an El Salvadoran concentration camp.

That’s what happened recently to Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.

Kilmar had finally begun to settle into a routine of sorts as he tasted a few early offerings of American life that immigrants still pursue even during these tragic times. He had negotiated his way through numerous barriers and had landed a job as a sheet metal worker after starting as a day laborer hitching gigs at Home Depot.

He’s now in a 40,000-inmate concentration camp known as CECOT in El Salvador.

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.

Its experiment with democracy appears to be nearing an end after a thirty-year trial run. Gangs overran the country. The nation’s freely elected governments found themselves helpless against the gangs, which were what was left after a long civil war left too many guns in too many gun cabinets around the country, along with a young workforce with few opportunities.

Its current president, Nayib Bukele, has been reintroducing a series of autocratic policies that will remind you of a certain American president. After hand-picking Supreme Court justices, Bukele convinced El Salvador’s high court to ditch the nation’s constitution and allow him to run for a second term in 2024. Running on a platform of reducing the ubiquity of gangs,¹ he handily won that second five-year term.

The Bukele government has arrested 53,000 young Salvadorans accused of being gang members, leading to the highest incarceration rate in the world and “the deaths of hundreds of detainees,” according to Wikipedia.²

The CECOT concentration camp is Bukele’s pride and joy. The American press, as usual, parrots the Trump regime’s description of CECOT as a “sprawling” 40,000 capacity prison. In truth, we treat chickens in cages better than the Salvadorans treat the men in CECOT.

In CECOT, hundreds of men sleep in one cell on metal beds with no mattresses.³ Those who aren’t in gangs quickly will be if they want to survive. Instead of pecking each other in the head with their beaks, CECOT men devise shanks with which to establish their system of prison justice.

Venezuelans (in theory) being rounded up to be prepared for insertion into their 200-person cell/cage by CECOT correction thugs. Image public domain from public court documents (pdf): “J.G.G., et al., Plaintiffs, v. DONALD J. TRUMP, in his official capacity as President of the United States, et al.”

It is to this environment that Kilmar was sent. Whether he is still alive is an open question.

Kilmar had his first encounter with America’s deportation machine in 2019, when he was snatched from a Home Depot parking lot while he and two others were looking for work opportunities.

It’s a common sight in the USA. Anyone who has driven into a Home Depot parking lot in the early hours has seen groups of day laborers hoping to hitch a gig for the day, week, or, maybe if they’re lucky, a month.

We all know that many of them are undocumented. But we also know they help make the general contractors who use Home Depot parking lots as an outplacement service wealthy.

The general contractor working on the house next to me is a bearded Georgia boy with one of his girlfriend’s names tattooed on his neck. He drives a $100,000 pickup truck with tires the size of a Mini Cooper, and until recently, was barking out instructions to his day laborers from early morning until sunset.

During these sad times, I find myself profiling him as a Trump supporter because his work uniform sports an American flag shoulder patch.⁴ And, because I can hear his pickup truck rumbling to the neighbor’s house while it’s still blocks away.

The last few days, he’s shown up at the worksite alone, when anyone shows up at all, without his usual contingent of low-wage helpers as he carries lumber with a grumpy face and angry eyes into the neighbor’s back yard. It’s the kind of work I never saw him do until recently.

The work on the neighbor’s house, which had been progressing steadily during the past few months, has turned into an abstract art exposition of wood beams and stone decorating the home’s lawn. Yesterday, somebody scrambled to wrap the art project in weather guard plastic as a rainstorm loomed overhead.

Was the contractor’s Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia snatched away from him, too?

If so, did his Abrego Garcia get disappeared into a 40,000-person prison in El Salvador like Kilmar did?

I want to ask him, but he’ll probably shoot me dead. I’d bet the value of one of his fat truck tires that he carries a beast of a gun. It’s Georgia, after all.

But I want to know. Is he sad that his Kilmar and other temporary workers are gone? Does he care that his workers may have been carted off to one of the world’s most notorious concentration camps?

You might assume Kilmar is an undocumented worker. He is not.

Kilmar, along with the rest of his family in Maryland, which includes a wife, a five-year-old child, and two stepchildren, is a U.S. citizen.

That’s because after he got picked up in 2019 as an undocumented migrant, he began the legalization process through an asylum program that has since been ended by the sadistic Trump regime.

Kilmar was able to demonstrate that he fled El Salvador as a 16-year-old trying to escape Salvadoran gangs who were trying to extort his mother’s food business. In other words, he received political asylum after he was able to prove that the gangs that tormented his family would hunt him if he returned to El Salvador.

A judge filed a legally binding order that Kilmar not be sent to El Salvador because he might face retribution for refusing to join one of the gangs that have dominated Salvadoran life for decades.

Like many immigrants, it’s been a long and winding road for Kilmar, who had to fend off claims that his 16-year-old self was part of the gang he was trying to run away from. Kilmar was successful in these efforts. The American judicial system agreed with his lawyers that he was a good kid.

Kilmar began to take steps toward full legalization. From a legal standpoint, he is now a U.S. citizen (albeit, in a foreign concentration camp). Kilmar, also like many immigrants, hasn’t been the type to sit back and wait for things to happen.

He picked up vital skills and was about to enter his home from his job as a sheet metal worker after picking up his five-year-old son from school, when America’s terror unit, ICE, showed up at the door and demanded he hurry his son inside to his wife.

Then, it was off to El Salvador for Kilmar. There, he was sent to the notorious CECOT prison complex.

Kilmar was picked up by ICE, in large part, it has been reported, because he was wearing a Bulls cap like the one shown in the photograph at the top of this story.

If that story seems too crazy to believe, I agree. That’s why I’m relying on an American Civil Liberties Union motion filed last week⁵ that exposed a Department of Homeland Security checklist used to profile suspicious Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.

On the checklist? Chicago Bulls and Michael Jordan apparel were two “identifiers” in determining gang membership in a Venezuelan criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua.

A third identifier was that the target be a Venezuelan.

Oops. Sorry, Kilmar. Y’all look the same to us.

Men rounded up by ICE to be disappeared into the Tecoluca, El Salvador concentration camp. Image public domain from public court documents (pdf): “J.G.G., et al., Plaintiffs, v. DONALD J. TRUMP, in his official capacity as President of the United States, et al.”

Kilmar’s wife, Jennifer, discusses Kilmar’s violent ways thusly:⁶

‘Kilmar is an excellent father; he has always been there for our three children and all of their needs. Two of them are on the autism spectrum, and our third has epilepsy. He has been the main provider of our household and the love of my life for over seven years. Since our family has been separated, I have been devastated and confused. I lost my life partner, my children lost their father, and all of our family, neighbors, co-workers, and friends have been devastated due to this unjust family separation.’

One of the ironies of the situation is that Kilmar, who, to repeat, isn’t even Venezuelan, was in America to get away from the kinds of people (Venezuelans) America’s mobster regime claims it is trying to save Americans from.

Men who the American regime claims are affiliated with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua arrive in the Tecoluca, El Salvador concentration camp. Photo public domain by the El Salvador’s Presidency Press Office

After being exposed by alert bloggers and organizations like CASA,⁷ the purveyors of this new terrorist regime now occupying the White House eventually admitted they made a mistake.

“Oh,” they said. “We thought he was Venezuelan. And an ‘illegal’ alien, too!”

Sidebar/Fun Fact: The word “illegal” is now etched into the American public’s consciousness to the point where there is no sympathy for undocumented workers, no matter how horrific the circumstances they are fleeing from. This is what happens when you allow a news channel owned by an Australian right-wing immigrant to distribute news 24/7.⁸ End sidebar.

Never mind the mistake, the Trump regime says. They can’t get him back. What’s done is done.

An apoplectic federal judge said, “Bring him back, anyway.”

The regime said, “No.”

You may be detecting another pattern here that the regime has quickly mastered: Open contempt for judicial orders.

How anyone could be surprised by this after eight years of a man who has consistently been wretchedly contemptuous of America’s judicial system is beyond me.

The case festered a bit until it wound up in the lap of the Supreme Court. There, in a unanimous decree, they said, “Bring him back.”

Sort of.

As you might expect with this Supreme Court, there was some fudge added to the mix. Now, if you’re at all like me, you understand that fudge can sometimes look like something else, especially when it is in its early, gooey stage, and in this case, it did. I’ll let legal beagle Joyce Vance explain:⁹

Late this afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a 9–0 response to the government’s application to vacate federal District Judge Paula Xinis’ order that the Trump administration return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from prison in El Salvador to the United States. Xinis had ordered him returned by the end of the day on Monday. The Supreme Court let him sit for an additional three days before ruling, in the end ordering the government to “facilitate” his return but suggesting they might not need to “effectuate” it.

It is no coincidence that the Supreme Court’s use of the word “effectuate” sounds like it would have something to do with fudgy excrement. In this case, the Supreme Court asked for clarification from the federal district court judge who ordered his return on what she meant when she said that ICE should “effectuate” Kilmar’s return.

For those of you for whom English is a second language or who missed the later rounds of spelling bees, here is Webster Dictionary’s definition of the word “effectuate” that the esteemed court justices had trouble with:¹⁰

to cause or bring about (something): to put (something) into effect or operation

Maybe the Supremes all went to Oxford University (I haven’t checked). This is the definition in the Oxford Dictionary (per Google's default landing page for the word’s definition):

put into force or operation.

This may not be clear enough for the orange dunce of dementia, whose reading level is below that of a first grader’s, but it’s clear to the rest of us, don’t you think? And it certainly had to be clear to the well-educated, conservative black-robed militia that has stolen the bench of America’s highest court.

The only explanation for the Supreme Court’s wording is that its conservative majority wanted to delay the order even though they knew no legal questions remained.

If you find that as frightening as I do, guess who agrees with us? Who else but Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has basically taken a watchdog role over her fellow justices.

Justice Sotomayor was not happy with the wording of the Supreme Court’s decision, and said so in what amounted to a dissent within the ruling she was compelled by compassion to agree to. She recognized the danger of asking for clarification regarding such a simple case of government-sanctioned terror. She wrote:

“The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

This means you or I could be deported to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, never to be seen again, because the government can hem and haw its way to your destruction.

I don’t know about you, but I’d last about half a minute in a place like CECOT, unless I could sell the inmates who run the place on my fabulous pontification skills.

The resistance press refers to this new version of state-sponsored terror as “disappearing” people for obvious reasons.

The judge who ordered Kilmar’s return, Paula Xinis, quickly responded to the Supreme Court’s bizarre request:

To this end, the Court hereby amends the Order to DIRECT that Defendants take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible.

I like how she used a MAGA ALL CAPS thingy, don’t you?

The regime then quickly whined that her request was too difficult to comply with within the window she provided.

Judge Xinis, of course, is aware that Kilmar’s life is in danger. The government knows this, too, but is perfectly content with that knowledge.

The government knows the danger to Kilmar so well that they have bigger plans afoot. Former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, who cut his autocratic teeth as a military contractor accused of slaughtering civilians in Iraq,¹¹ wants to build private prisons overseas.

The idea is to take the grand idea of El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security prison to the next level. This means building a network of overseas prisons, and sending Americans to them based on a variety of often automated factors blown out by a database query facilitated by MuskBrats.

For now, Prince is proposing that the regime declare portions of CECOT as U.S. territory so pesky judges like Judge Xinis can’t interfere.¹² As the prison fills, Prince’s coalition of private contractors would build similar private prisons, also sliced with a wedge of U.S. territory.

It sounds too bizarre to come to fruition, but it’s impossible to discount the amount of damage that can be done while they try their wacky plan.

Meanwhile, the MuskBrats have devised a system whereby they are deleting Social Security numbers from the Social Security database, thus cutting Americans off from the financial system.¹³

The next step will be sending those deleted from the system to concentration camps in Guantanamo or the mountains of El Salvador or the next nefarious location devised by the twisted minds who are now in charge of the American justice system.

The step after that is they will come for you.

To borrow loosely from the famous poem by Martin Niemöller:¹⁴

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 Charles Bastille
And I did not speak out
Because I was not Charles Bastille.

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.

Notes

I warned y’all about this before the election:

The Neighbors Beyond the Yard

People still seem to be struggling with the reality of what is happening. Most Americans continue to be in full denial. Restacking this article and others like it might help with that. Just saying.

As I write this, headlines are rolling in that contempt proceedings against the U.S. government have begun in Judge Xinis’ courtroom.

The State Department on Saturday afternoon (April 12, 2025) released a statement claiming that Kilmar is “ is alive and secure in that facility [CECOT].” There is no such thing as “secure” in a place like that. His fellow Americans still have no way to confirm if he’s alive.¹⁵

The Alien Enemies Act, under which the U.S. government’s terror campaign is run, is an antiquated 1789 law originally designed to deal with British redcoats hiding in the woods after the Revolutionary War.

This article first appeared on the Medium platform. I’m reproducing here for maximum exposure because of the severity of the situation.

Footnotes

1. As opposed to, you know, ending poverty.

2. “El Salvador - Wikipedia.” 2021. Wikipedia.org. 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador#Bukele_presidency_(2019%E2%80%93present).

3. In that sense, it is similar to the Middle Passage, but without the passage.

4. You know you live in a ruined country when its flag begins to represent fascist mentality.

5. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.67.21.pdf (PDF)

6. “CASA Demands Justice for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – We Are Casa.” 2019. Wearecasa.org. 2019. https://wearecasa.org/casa-demands-justice-for-kilmar-armando-abrego-garcia/.

7. “We Are Casa – WE HELP BUILDING POWER and IMPROVING the QUALITY of LIFE in LOW-INCOME IMMIGRANT COMMUNITIES.” 2025. Wearecasa.org. 2025. https://wearecasa.org/.

8. I’d mention the Fairness Doctrine, but we’re far beyond the point of thinking about that these days.

9. Vance, Joyce. 2025. “The Supreme Court Finally Rules.” Substack.com. Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . April 11, 2025. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/the-supreme-court-finally-rules.

10. “Merriam-Webster Dictionary.” 2025. Merriam-Webster.com. April 3, 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effectuate.

11. to, Contributors. 2007. “2007 Mass Shooting in Iraq.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. September 29, 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisour_Square_massacre.

12. Burns, Dasha, and Myah Ward. 2025. “Military Contractors Pitch Unprecedented Prison Plan for Detained Immigrants.” POLITICO. Politico. April 11, 2025. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/military-contractors-prison-plan-detained-immigrants-erik-prince-00287208.

13. Weissert, Will, and Fatima Hussein. 2025. “Social Security Lists 6,000 Who Immigrated Legally as Dead to Prompt Them to Leave, AP Sources Say.” AP News. April 11, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/living-immigrants-dead-social-security-numbers-trump-c10737cbe36e3108fb244a555777d880

14. “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/.

15. Romero, Laura, Katherine Faulders, Fritz Farrow, and Ivan Pereira. 2025. “State Department Reveals Status of Man Erroneously Deported to El Salvador.” ABC News. April 12, 2025. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/state-department-reveals-status-man-erroneously-deported-el/story?id=120752503&source=post_page-----fb17044e4b50---------------------------------------.

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