The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia offers a neat Rorschach test on immigration.
Is Garcia simply a law-abiding "Maryland father" who was cruelly deported to El Salvador due to the callousness of the Trump administration, as a sympathetic Atlantic article has it?
Or is he a member of the sadistic MS-13 gang and therefore deserving of deportation, regardless of any "administrative error" on the part of the Trump Department of Justice, as the administration and its vocal online supporters argue?
Garcia's court records suggest the answer likely lies somewhere in a frustrating middle ground that will satisfy neither the administration nor its critics. Those critics have cast him sympathetically as an upstanding member of the community who, after illegally entering the country in 2011 at age 16, married an American citizen with whom he fathered a disabled child, whom he was supporting before he was sent to El Salvador's brutal "Terrorism Confinement Center."
Garcia first crossed paths with the authorities in 2019 when he was spotted loitering in front of a Maryland Home Depot with three other men who were identified by police as high-ranking MS-13 members.
Police handed Garcia over to ICE for deportation, but he was granted a "withholding of removal" by an immigration judge based on his claim that he would be persecuted by the Barrio 18 gang if he were returned to El Salvador.
According to court documents, the gang — an MS-13 rival that was substantially more powerful in 2011 than it is now, thanks to a recent government crackdown on crime — was trying to extort protection money from his family's pupusa business. Garcia claimed that the gang's threats forced him to flee his home country, though several members of his family stayed behind.
Garcia was deported to El Salvador in violation of the immigration judge's order due to what the Department of Justice admitted in a Monday court filing was an "administrative error." Under the judge's order, Garcia could technically have been deported to another country, just not El Salvador.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dismissed the violation of the judge's order as a mere "clerical error" when asked about the case on Tuesday, emphasizing that Garcia is a gang member whose deportation made his Maryland community safer.
But is he, in fact, a gang member?
Based on the available information, it's impossible to say with certainty that Garcia is a member of MS-13, but there are some compelling facts, put forward by the government during Garcia's long journey through the immigration courts, that point in that direction: A confidential source who was considered reliable by law enforcement identified Garcia as a "ranking member" of the MS-13 "Westerns" clique.
The identity of this source and the context of his relationship, if any, with Garcia is unknown, but we do know that he was able to provide Garcia's gang nickname, which every member receives upon admission to the gang.
In pushing back on the government's claim that Garcia is a member of the Westerns clique, his attorney argued before the immigration judge that his client has never been to Long Island, N. Y., where the Westerns clique is based. It's unclear whether that claim is true, but even if it is, it does not necessarily rule out his membership in the clique.
Steven Dudley, a senior fellow at American University's Center for Latin American and Latino Studies who wrote a book on the gang, MS 13: The Making of America's Most Notorious Gang, points out that MS-13 cliques often escape their original territory by allowing ranking members, a label the informant applied to Garcia, to open up shop in other parts of the country.
"It's perfectly feasible that the person could be in Maryland and be a member of that clique," Dudley says, though he cautions that he doesn't know the specifics of Garcia's case.
Dudley also points out that MS-13 has a long had an active presence in the greater Washington, D.C., area, including in Maryland.
The government also cited the fact that Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat when he was picked up. MS-13 has adopted the Bulls Devil horns logo; obviously, there are thousands of law-abiding Bulls fans out there, even in Maryland. The immigration judge said she was “reluctant to give evidentiary weight to [his] clothing as an indication of gang affiliation,” though she was convinced enough by the word of the confidential informant to deny Garcia bond when he came before her in 2019. That's not the same as a judicial finding of evidence of gang membership, much less a criminal conviction after a full trial, but it does mean that the only court to look closely into Garcia's case thought there was substance to the charge that he was in MS-13.
Given it was merely a bond hearing, Garcia's attorney was not entitled to cross-examine the officer who put forward the informant's account and who attested that the informant had a reliable record. That officer, it should be noted, was later suspended for reasons apparently unrelated to the case.
Nothing in the Immigration Appeals Board’s subsequent decision to block his deportation to El Salvador suggests the authorities came to doubt his membership in the gang. That decision was based on the danger to Garcia of being returned to his country of origin.
In fact, if Garcia were a member of MS-13, that membership might explain why Barrio 18, a major MS-13 rival, targeted him to the point that he was forced to flee.
However, Garcia managed to remain in the U.S. for more than ten years without developing any criminal record beyond three traffic citations for driving without a license. Garcia's clean record makes Dudley "very, very skeptical" of his membership in the gang.
Were he a gang member, "he would most likely have some kind of criminal record," Dudley says.
Is Garcia a law-abiding father subjected to the whims of a careless and cruel administration, or a threat to public safety whose removal, even if it wasn't technically done by the book, is a credit to the president's agenda?
Absent further revelations, we'll likely never know.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site