🚨Kilmar Abrego Garcia is Free!
The Man They Tried to Break Comes Home. The Crimes Against Kilmar Will Boomerang.
WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia stepped out of the Putnam County jail in Cookville, Tennessee on Friday wearing a white button-down shirt, black pants, and the look of a man who has carried his family’s hopes like a sack of bricks across borders, prisons, and courtrooms. He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. A Salvadoran migrant, a father, a husband, a man who should never have been shackled and shipped like freight back to El Salvador in the first place, was free — for now.
Kilmar is heading back to Maryland, to home confinement and the electronic bracelet that makes a grown man feel like property. But for the first time since March, he will sleep under the same roof as his children. That is no small thing in an America where, too often, families like his are treated as contraband.
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Jennifer, his wife, has been marching in the rain with a photo of her husband, and the children have been learning what it means to grow up American by watching their father be thrown into a Salvadoran mega-prison. The crime here wasn’t Kilmar’s. It was the government’s — a blunder at best, a vendetta at worst.
Abrego Garcia had a court order protecting him from deportation to El Salvador, but the Trump people sent him anyway, straight into the belly of the CECOT prison, where he says he was beaten and tortured. When the courts forced the government to bring him back, they slapped smuggling charges on him from a two-year-old traffic stop that local cops barely blinked at at the time.
That’s not justice. That’s spite.
The United States prides itself on the rule of law — due process, habeas corpus, all the civic catechism — but what happens when the government ignores its own judges, invents new enemies, and deports people it is forbidden to deport?
Kilmar’s ordeal tells us that this government’s war on migrants has slipped past the legal boundaries and into the realm of something more sinister: punitive exile and political theater. The message was clear — challenge the system, and the system will crush you. Except it didn’t. Judges in Tennessee and Maryland called the government’s bluff, defense lawyers stood firm, and now Kilmar is back with his family.
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But here’s the thing about power: abuse it long enough and it boomerangs. The crimes committed against Kilmar — the wrongful deportation, the imprisonment, the smearing of his name as a gang member without evidence — will not stay buried in court dockets. They will resurface, like they always do, and they will stain the legacies of the people who carried them out.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Kilmar “the worst of the worst.” That is the language of fear politics, of dehumanization, the same language used to justify internment camps and blacklists. But the courts didn’t buy it. Neither did the lawyers, or the neighbors holding vigils, or the Maryland judge who ordered Kilmar restored to his community.
What happens to one man happens to the body politic. If Kilmar’s rights can be stripped, then so can yours. Today, he is home with his children. Tomorrow, the trial looms. But the greater trial belongs to the government — and history is a ruthless judge.
MY TAKE: Kilmar’s release is a reprieve, a reminder, and maybe a prophecy. The system that tried to crush him may yet answer for what it did.
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