THE ESSENTIAL MYSTERY OF THE KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA CASE. After all the talking and arguing about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal border-crosser and alleged gang member deported by the United States and now imprisoned in El Salvador, there is still a fundamental unanswered question about the case: Why is he imprisoned in El Salvador?
“We deport many people to El Salvador,” Art Arthur, a longtime immigration judge who now studies the subject for the Center for Immigration Studies, notes. “Generally, they arrive at the airport, walk out, and live their lives. Why is Abrego Garcia in prison?”
Some of what follows is based on a recent conversation with Arthur. There was speculation involved because there is much we don’t know about the case. On the other hand, Arthur knows a lot about the subject generally, having worked on immigration issues in the Justice Department, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and on Capitol Hill. We started with the big question.
“Why did the Salvadoran government put this guy in jail — that’s a question I don’t know,” Arthur said. “What I think is that everybody has this case backwards. People think Trump threw this guy out of the U.S. because he wants to throw out all MS-13 in the U.S. It makes more sense that the Salvadoran government asked for this guy back.”
“There’s no reason why the Trump administration would want this guy in jail in El Salvador,” Arthur concluded. “As long as he is out of the United States, that’s what we care about. The only organization that would want him in jail in El Salvador is the government of El Salvador.”
There’s no doubt that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has been waging an intense and enormously successful war against gangs in his country. He’s pretty much put an end to Barrio 18, which played a role in the Abrego Garcia case. And he has done a lot of damage to MS-13.
We know that the Trump administration agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to imprison about 300 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua who were sent earlier this year. Given that the U.S. says the Tren de Aragua members work with the Venezuelan government, it would make sense not to send them back to Venezuela and send them to El Salvador instead. And we know that Bukele put them, along with the Salvadoran members of MS-13 the U.S. also sent back, in the notorious CECOT prison.
“There must be some reason that the Salvadoran government put Abrego Garcia into the prison that they put all the MS-13 members into,” Arthur said. “As I understand it, it’s strictly a gang prison.” Arthur added that Abrego Garcia’s original alibi, from his 2019 run-in with U.S. immigration authorities, was that his family had been extorted by Barrio 18 over the profits of their small pupusa business and that therefore he feared returning to El Salvador. It is a classic gang tale, Arthur said: “Abrego Garcia’s original story was that Barrio 18 wants to hurt me. Extortion claims like that are very, very, very common in gang cases. It makes a lot more sense if he’s MS-13. When I was a judge, I probably heard that claim 30 times.” Indeed, it makes all the sense in the world for a gang member not to want to return to the country where rival gang members want to kill him.
Arthur said that were he still a judge, he would not have granted Abrego Garcia’s 2019 request for “withholding of removal” — that is, the judge’s decision to issue a removal order for Abrego Garcia but bar the government from sending him to El Salvador. That pretty much let Abrego Garcia stay in the U.S. indefinitely. “Generally, if you’re granted withholding, they don’t bother deporting you,” Arthur said. “You’re never going to become a citizen, and you’re never going to get a green card.”
Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia is no longer a resident of CECOT; we learned from the visiting Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that, under the intense glare of publicity, Salvadoran authorities moved Abrego to a lower-security facility in Santa Ana. At least four House Democrats have traveled to El Salvador to line up to see Abrego Garcia, who has become a much sought-after figure in Democratic politics.
But at the bottom of it all, we still don’t know why Abrego Garcia is in prison. Knowing the answer to that essential question would take us a long way toward understanding the latest Trump administration cause celebre.