Trump Is Weaponizing the Justice System in Plain Sight

Last Friday, the Trump administration suddenly announced that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been brought back to the United States from the mega-prison in El Salvador, CECOT, two months after the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the administration must facilitate his return.

It ought to have been cause for celebration. But it wasn’t. Instead of returning Garcia to his family in Maryland, officials sent him to a jail in Tennessee, where he is now facing an array of human trafficking charges that could result in his spending the rest of his life behind bars.

I guess it’s possible that Garcia is indeed a master of deception; that all the years he spent as a construction worker in Maryland since his arrival in 2011 were nothing but a smokescreen. But it’s also possible that the government has gone on a fishing expedition, dredging up an old traffic stop in Tennessee, during which the officers who stopped him alleged that he was driving a car full of undocumented immigrants rather than the construction workers Garcia claimed they were, in an apparent attempt to give an after-the-fact justification for Garcia’s entirely unjustified deportation to CECOT in March. It seems entirely likely that they are making Garcia out to be a high-level criminal operative because that’s more palatable to them than admitting that they screwed up with his initial deportation.

From the get-go, the administration has refused to back down gracefully in the Garcia case. After government officials acknowledged that he was deported because of an “administrative error”—along with a couple hundred other Venezuelan and El Salvadoran men who were quite deliberately, and in cold blood, deported to indefinite detention in CECOT—the administration fired the Justice Department lawyer who let it be known in court that he was uncomfortable with what had gone down for not being loyal enough to Trump’s agenda. When US district judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to provide additional information on the case, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials invoked manifestly bogus national security arguments as a rationale for not complying. And when the courts, including the US Supreme Court, ordered them to “facilitate” the return of Garcia, the administration simply pretended that it had no sway over El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and couldn’t compel Garcia’s return (a fiction that was promptly undermined by Trump’s admitting that he could easily secure Garcia’s release if he wanted to, but that he chose not to).

Now, the administration is further weaponizing the justice system to legitimize their actions against Garcia. So blatant is this that a veteran DOJ prosecutor in Nashville, Tennessee, Ben Schrader, resigned over concerns that Garcia was being prosecuted as a vindictive political reprisal rather than on anything approaching a bulletproof case.

It’s part of a pattern of going after any and all undocumented immigrants, and then finding the flimsiest of reasons to label them “criminals” or “terrorists,” and those who support and provide services to them as aiders and abetters of criminals.

Witness what has been happening in Los Angeles over the past months. In mid-April, plainclothes DHS agents attempted to gain access to first graders in two elementary schools in the city, fraudulently claiming that both the children’s guardians had given their permission for the interviews, and that they were only doing wellness checks to make sure the kids weren’t being abused by criminally minded undocumented guardians.

And this past week garment workers and day laborers have been dragged, handcuffed, from their jobs, warehoused in makeshift detention centers, and pressured to sign papers agreeing to be deported. Some of them have then been summarily dumped at the border crossings and made to walk into Mexico.

Those who have hit the streets to oppose these tactics are being labeled “insurrectionists,” to justify the federalizing of national guard troops and US marines against protesters. Among those caught in this vise was SEIU California president David Huerta, who was arrested at the protests last week, and who spent two days in jail before posting bond. He is being charged with conspiracy to impede an officer and could, if convicted, spend years in a federal prison.

Astoundingly, on Thursday, when US Senator Alex Padilla, who was in LA to receive a briefing with Gen. Gregory Guillot about conditions on the ground, attempted to ask DHS Secretary Kristi Noem questions at an event she was holding in the federal building in West Los Angeles, he was violently manhandled out of the building by buzz-cut FBI agents.