Deported, Returned, Punished – The Case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the Moral Bankruptcy of the American Rule of Law

Greenbelt, Maryland – It is a case that runs like a crack through the foundation of American justice. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, husband, father, worker – and a symbol of a system that refuses to admit its own mistakes. Months ago, he was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, the country he had fled from as a teenager. An administrative error, officials said soothingly at the time. But anyone who looks closer sees that this was no accident but a pattern: the deliberate cruelty of a government that turns errors into punishment and sacrifices human rights to the ego of a president.

CECOT Prison – The Hell of El Salvador. We managed to obtain partially non-public images from CECOT – they are not for the faint of heart. You can find the footage in the article: “The Two Sides of the Abyss and the Ghost of American Intervention in Latin America” here:. Die Aufnahmen finden sie im Artikel: „Die zwei Seiten des Abgrunds und das Gespenst amerikanischer Intervention in Lateinamerika„ hier: https://kaizen-blog.org/en/die-zwei-seiten-des-abgrunds-und-das-gespenst-amerikanischer-intervention-in-lateinamerika/

In March 2025, Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador, even though a court had already ruled in 2019 that his life would be in danger there. When the mistake became public, U.S. authorities brought him back – reluctantly, under pressure from the federal court. But instead of rehabilitating him, a new hunt began: the government announced that it now wanted to deport him to Liberia, a country with which he has no connection whatsoever. A country he has never been to, where he has no family, no language, no roots. A country that has agreed to take him in only “temporarily” – and reserves the right to send him elsewhere at any time, possibly back to El Salvador.

The 37-year-old’s lawyers speak of retaliation, of a deliberate humiliation. “He has designated Costa Rica as the country of his choice,” they write. “The government must respect that. Anything else is arbitrary and unlawful.” But the Justice Department argues differently. It cites diplomatic assurances from Monrovia – Liberia has guaranteed that Abrego Garcia would not face persecution or torture there. That assurance, it says, is sufficient and cannot be questioned by the court, since it falls under the domain of foreign policy. In other words, human rights as an executive privilege.

What sounds like a formal pretext about jurisdiction is in truth a question of human dignity. The government claims that Abrego Garcia does not possess the same constitutional rights as U.S. citizens. Because he entered the country illegally, he must be treated as if he still stood “at the threshold of the nation.” A legal trick designed to pull the ground from under his feet. Yet his lawyers refer to a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that explicitly states that people who live, work, and build families in the United States – in short, who lead a life here – are entitled to due process protections.

Abrego Garcia has lived in Maryland for years. He has an American wife, a child, a life built from scratch. What threatens him is not deportation in the legal sense but existential uprooting. That the government wants to deport this man of all people to Africa has less to do with law than with vengeance. It is an attempt to erase an inconvenient precedent – a man who successfully challenged a wrongful deportation and must now pay the price for it. The case reveals how thin the veneer of the rule of law has become. The government claims that “all obstacles” to his removal to Liberia have been eliminated. Yet the real scandal lies in the fact that it created the greatest obstacle itself: the disregard of court orders, the deliberate circumvention of judicial oversight, the political abuse of asylum law. In a time when the Department of Homeland Security under Trump detains thousands of migrants without legal counsel, the case of Abrego Garcia acts as a magnifying glass – showing how a system that pretends to create order in reality administers injustice.

While government attorneys request the dissolution of the injunction preventing deportation, Abrego Garcia is preparing for another hearing – this time in Tennessee, where he faces charges of alleged human smuggling. His defense here is the same: politically motivated. “Selective or vindictive prosecution,” his motion for dismissal reads. The trial is set for December 8. Should he be acquitted – and all evidence points to that – he would still be deported, without having committed any crime. Since March, we have all been fighting in this case against a system that preaches law and enforces injustice. A system that does not protect but destroys – people, principles, every trace of decency.

One might dismiss this case as a legal farce, as bureaucratic mishaps in an overburdened system. But that would be too convenient. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is not an exception but a mirror. He shows how the United States of America under Donald Trump no longer uses the law as a shield but as a weapon. And in the end stands a man who asks for nothing more than what every human being deserves – a fair hearing, the respect of his dignity, the fulfillment of a promise once made. Costa Rica. Not El Salvador. Not Liberia. Just justice, if that word still means anything at all.