Today Kilmar Abrego Garcia is free. He is now with his family in Maryland. – But …

The story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia reads like a dystopian novel, yet it is bitter reality and reveals the shocking erosion of the rule of law at the heart of American democracy. While the Trump administration tries to crush a man who lived peacefully with his family in Maryland for more than a decade through a perfidious net of illegal deportation, torture, and extortionate threats, the international community remains deafeningly silent. It is a silence that makes us all accomplices – a silence broken only by the few investigative journalists who have been fighting windmills for months, traveling to El Salvador, while most major media outlets only wake up when the story has already reached its most dramatic stages and can generate spectacular headlines with minimal effort.

What is unfolding here is nothing less than the complete perversion of asylum law and the Geneva Refugee Convention. A man who in 2019 was explicitly certified by a US immigration judge as facing persecution and violence by local gangs in El Salvador – a judicial protection status that should be sacrosanct – was nevertheless deported to precisely that country through an alleged “administrative error.” But this was no error, it was the beginning of a state vendetta whose brutality and contempt for the law are unparalleled. The fact that Abrego was imprisoned in El Salvador’s notorious anti-terror prison CECOT, where he claims he endured “severe beatings,” sleep deprivation, malnutrition, and other forms of torture, turns this “administrative error” into a crime against humanity. Reports from other inmates, who were recently released in a prisoner exchange between El Salvador and Venezuela, confirm this hell on earth – and yet the international outcry remains absent.

The legal farce reaches its climax in the current extortion tactics of the Trump administration: after a federal judge forced the government to bring Abrego back to the US – which was ignored for months until smuggling charges were hastily constructed to create a pretext – he now faces an impossible choice. Either he pleads guilty to crimes he vehemently denies and will be deported to Costa Rica, where he could live in relative safety, or he insists on his innocence and will be sent to Uganda, a country to which he has no connection and where his safety and freedom would be acutely threatened. This threat of Uganda – a country that has only just signed an agreement to take in third-country nationals but explicitly does not accept criminals, which makes the government’s own portrayal of Abrego as a dangerous MS-13 member absurd – is nothing less than state extortion in its purest form.

The legal implications of this case are catastrophic and go far beyond the individual tragedy. Here the fundamental principle of non-refoulement, the prohibition of return, which forms the core of international refugee protection, is being trampled upon. Article 33 of the Geneva Refugee Convention explicitly prohibits the expulsion or return of refugees to territories where their life or freedom would be threatened. The US, as a signatory state to this convention, is here violating not only national but also international law. The threat to deport Abrego to Uganda – a country with which he has no cultural, linguistic, or familial ties – represents a particularly perfidious form of forced migration reminiscent of the darkest chapters of human history.

The role of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in this scandal deserves special attention. Her statement about “activist liberal judges” immediately after Abrego’s release reveals a shocking contempt for the separation of powers and judicial independence. When a Homeland Security Secretary publicly declares that she will “not stop fighting until this Salvadoran man finds justice and is OUT of our country,” that is not only a prejudgment but also a threat to the judiciary itself. It is the language of authoritarianism, the rhetoric of those who see the rule of law as an obstacle rather than as the foundation of democracy.

The government’s claim that Abrego is an MS-13 member and “foreign terrorist” is based on evidence that even federal judges have described as “scant.” Nevertheless, this unproven accusation is wielded like a sword of Damocles over him to justify his deportation and undermine public support for his case. It is the old tactic of dehumanization: label someone as a gang member or terrorist, and suddenly all violations of rights seem justified. Yet even if these accusations were true – which Abrego vehemently denies and for which there is no convincing evidence – it would not justify state torture, illegal deportation, and extortionate tactics. Human rights are not negotiable, they apply universally or not at all.

The cynical trade in human lives that we are witnessing here – the deals with Uganda and Costa Rica, negotiated like at a bazaar – shows how far the US has strayed from its own founding principles. The Statue of Liberty with its inscription “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” has become a bitter irony. Instead, we are witnessing a system that treats people like commodities, that strikes deals with autocratic regimes to get rid of unwanted persons, and that tramples the most fundamental principles of human dignity.

The fact that Abrego has lived in the US for more than ten years, founded a family there, and his children go to school there, makes this case all the more tragic. Here not only an individual is being destroyed, but an entire family torn apart. The psychological trauma his children suffer when their father first disappears, then is tortured, and now may be torn from their lives forever, is immeasurable. This is collective punishment in its cruelest form. What we are witnessing here is a test case for the resilience of democratic institutions. If the executive can ignore judicial decisions, break international treaties, and force people into confessions through torture and extortion, then the rule of law is dead. Then we live in a system where power breaks the law, where the weakest are at the mercy of the arbitrariness of the powerful. Abrego’s lawyers put it aptly in their filing: “It is hard to imagine a path the government could have taken that would have better emphasized its vindictiveness.” The international community, the United Nations, the human rights organizations – they all should be crying out. Yet instead there is numbing silence. Occasionally there is a press release, a concerned tweet, but no concrete measures, no sanctions, no real pressure. This passivity makes us all accomplices. If we allow such atrocities to happen in a country that sees itself as a beacon of democracy, then we have lost all moral authority to denounce human rights violations elsewhere.

The few of us who have followed this story from the beginning, who have observed every court date, analyzed every document, exposed every lie, often stand alone. The costs – financial, emotional, sometimes even physical – are enormous. Traveling to El Salvador to research conditions in CECOT is not only expensive but also dangerous. Hours of phone calls with traumatized witnesses, working through hundreds of pages of legal documents, constant confrontation with state brutality – all of this wears down the strength. And while we do this work, mostly underpaid and understaffed, the major media outlets wait until they can harvest the fruits of our work, until the story has progressed far enough that they can generate maximum attention with minimal effort.

The Abrego Garcia case is a wake-up call. It shows how fragile our democratic institutions are, how quickly the rule of law can turn into arbitrariness, how easy it is to dehumanize people and deny their rights. If we do not act now, if we do not confront these blatant violations of the law with all determination, then this case will become a precedent. Then the exception will become the rule, the scandal the normality.

The deadline is approaching. Monday, August 25, 2025, Abrego is supposed to report to the ICE office in Baltimore. We will be there too. Until then he has time to plead guilty to crimes he did not commit in order to avoid deportation to Uganda. It is a choice between plague and cholera, an extortion that should be unthinkable in a rule of law. The question is: how much longer will society look away in such cases? How much longer will we remain silent? And above all: when will we realize that what is happening to Kilmar Abrego Garcia today can happen to any of us tomorrow if we do not rise up now, in this moment, and say no to this perversion of law and justice?

The story is not yet finished. We can still intervene, we can still prevent this injustice. But that requires more than a few investigative journalists fighting windmills. It requires an international public that no longer looks away, governments that exert pressure, human rights organizations that act instead of only speaking. It requires all of us. Because if we fail now, if we abandon Kilmar Abrego Garcia to his fate, then we have not only let down one man – we have betrayed the fundamental principles on which our civilization should rest: human dignity, the rule of law, and the inalienable rights of every individual. The time to act is now. Tomorrow may be too late.

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