America’s Justice Farce: The Endless Struggle of Kilmar Abrego Garcia

The handcuffs clicked on Monday morning in Baltimore. Once again. For Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 30 years old, father, metalworker, it must have felt like an endless nightmare with no awakening. The US immigration authority ICE had arrested him once more - barely three days after he had left a jail in Tennessee, where he had been charged with alleged human smuggling. An accusation that upon closer examination turns out to be a transparent maneuver to make an inconvenient case disappear.

The inhumane arrest in Baltimore marks the provisional low point of an odyssey that stands as an example of the brutality of Trump’s immigration policy. Here a man, who has lived in the US since fleeing El Salvador at the age of 16, who has founded an American family, who works and pays taxes, is turned into a pawn of a machinery that has long since abandoned law and logic.

The absurd theater of deportation to Uganda

Uganda. One has to let that melt on the tongue. A country to which Abrego Garcia has no connection at all is suddenly supposed to become his new home. Why? Because the Trump administration wants it that way. Because an obscure agreement between Washington and Kampala makes it possible. Because a man who successfully prevented his deportation to El Salvador - with judicial approval, since he faces persecution and possibly death there - must be punished for his persistence.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, is fighting selflessly against this Kafkaesque arbitrariness. With stoic determination he has now played the card of the asylum application - a legal move intended to block the looming deportation to Uganda for the time being. It is the desperate attempt to find a spark of rule of law in a system that breaks its own rules.

The chronology of events reads like a textbook of state harassment: in 2019 an immigration judge forbids deportation to El Salvador because of credible death threats. The Trump administration ignores this and deports Abrego Garcia there in March 2024 anyway. After massive legal pressure and an intervention by the Supreme Court it has to bring him back in June. But instead of apologizing, they press charges for human smuggling - against the victim of their own unlawful deportation. The claim that Abrego Garcia is a member of the notorious MS-13 gang is based on nothing but the statements of an anonymous informant who said clothing and tattoos identified him as a gang member. He was never charged for this, never convicted. But in the logic of the immigration authorities mere suspicion is enough to destroy a life.

What is happening here is more than just an individual drama. It is the systematic perversion of the principles of the rule of law. When a country like Uganda, whose president Yoweri Museveni has ruled with an iron fist for nearly four decades, becomes a willing accomplice in the disposal of unwanted migrants, when judicial decisions are ignored, when families are torn apart in the name of a policy that confuses toughness with strength, then more is at stake than the fate of an individual. Judge Paula Xinis has for the time being ruled that Abrego Garcia may not be deported as long as the case is pending. A small victory in a David versus Goliath fight. But the government has already signaled that it complies only reluctantly. The hearing on October 6 will show whether there is still room for justice in this country - or whether the deportation machinery rolls on unstoppably, indifferent to human suffering, deaf to the voice of the law.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia meanwhile sits in custody, trapped within 200 miles around the court in Maryland, separated from his American wife and children. A man who wanted nothing more than to live in safety and provide for his family has become a symbol of a system that has lost its soul. His lawyer Sandoval-Moshenberg and all of us will continue to fight, with legal skill, researched finesse and moral clarity. The asylum application is his newest move in a chess game where the other side changes the rules at will. The bitter realization remains: In a country that sees itself as a beacon of freedom, a human being can become a hostage of his own search for safety. And while politicians in Washington debate border security, families in Baltimore, in Maryland, all over the country, are breaking apart under a policy that has declared toughness a virtue and humanity a weakness.

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