CECOT Forever

DOJ tries to prove Abrego Garcia is part of MS-13: Attorney General Pam Bondi has decided that instead of working to facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as the Supreme Court has ordered, she will instead take to X to release documents from his 2019 arrest, in which a detective claimed he was an MS-13 member.

That’s one approach, I guess.

These documents had already been publicly available, if you cared to look through the prior court proceedings. The Gang Field Interview Sheet, drafted up by Ivan Mendez, then an officer with the Prince George’s County Police Department, says Abrego Garcia was arrested with purported MS-13 members in a Home Depot parking lot, that he was wearing clothing that they believe to be affiliated with MS-13 (“a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations” which “officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture”), and that a confidential informant said he was part of MS-13.

Interestingly, reporting by The New Republic notes that Mendez was suspended the next month for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.” (“The information he provided focused on an on-going police investigation,” per the county’s news release.)

Information has also come out about Abrego Garcia allegedly beating his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, stemming from a protection order she filed against him in 2021: “At this point, I am afraid to be close to him,” she wrote in the protection order. “I have multiple photos/videos of how violent he can be and all the bruises he [has] left me.” She cites specific examples from August 2020 and November 2020 in which he was violent toward her. Vasquez Sura told CNN that “she sought a civil protective order in 2021 after a disagreement with Abrego Garcia” and that “she had survived a previous relationship that included domestic violence.” She says she did not appear at a court hearing and pursue the matter further: “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling.”

Working through marital troubles—even when violence is involved—appears to be something the vice president sorta…supports: “Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it’s easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s,” J.D. Vance said in 2022. “My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, ’til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s.” (Vance has written elsewhere about his grandparents’ marriage turning violent at times.)

“Based on the sensationalism of many of the people in this room, you would think we deported a candidate for Father of the Year,” snarked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Leavitt commented from the podium that “it’s appalling and sad that Sen. [Chris] Van Hollen [D–Md.] and the Democrats applauding his trip to El Salvador today are incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents and our citizens,” before gesturing to Patty Morin, a woman whose daughter was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant in 2023. “Nobody knows this more than the woman standing to my right, Patty Morin,” added Leavitt.

Whether Rachel Morin or Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student killed by an illegal immigrant while jogging, the administration keeps implying that you cannot both support due process for Abrego Garcia and have empathy for the victims of violence from illegal immigrants. (I think people can hold multiple ideas in their heads at once.)

None of this really matters in terms of what the U.S. government is obligated to do: The Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. The administration continues to demur on this front, instead choosing to release, via X…the protective order Vasquez Sura filed:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a history of violence and was not the upstanding “Maryland Man” the media has portrayed him as.

According to court filings, Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence restraining order against him, claiming he punched, scratched, and ripped off her shirt,… pic.twitter.com/FpSV0k3i90

— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) April 16, 2025

Of course, most people are neither angels nor demons, and even very bad and violent people—if that is what Abrego Garcia is—deserve due process. The punishment for wifebeating in Maryland, or entering the country illegally, is not indefinite confinement in a Salvadoran prison. He has not just been deported, he has been locked up in CECOT. (“A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world,” writes The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein. “It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin.”)

More specifically, if the administration is trying to deport the man under the Alien Enemies Act, he is entitled to a habeas hearing to confront the charges that he’s an MS-13 member (as Glenn Greenwald details below).

A few facts regardless of what side of the due process/deportation debate you’re on raised by Vance:

1) Only reason Abrego Garcia case is a controversy is an immigration court blocked his deportation, and Trump Admin admitted he was “mistakenly” picked up by ICE.

2) SCOTUS… https://t.co/b4QF2axiVu

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 16, 2025

Even if the idea that Abrego Garcia deserves due process is uncompelling to you, zoom out for a second and consider the many other people who have been sent to CECOT without the ability to contest the charges against them, unsure if they will ever be released. This isn’t deportation. This is cruelty to make a political point (as some resistance types would claim during Trump 1.0): Don’t come here. If you’re already here illegally, be afraid. After all, home-growns are next.

The Miami Herald published a great article about one man who applied for refugee status, received it, and was seized at the airport and sent to CECOT for no reason: https://t.co/YQoM4UVbn5 I posted it and everyone went “yeah that seems bad”. Garcia, though, we can argue over.

— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) April 16, 2025

Israel had wanted to strike Iran’s nuclear sites: Over the last few weeks, Trump administration officials apparently dissuaded Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear sites. “Israeli officials had recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May,” reports The New York Times. “They were prepared to carry them out, and at times were optimistic that the United States would sign off. The goal of the proposals, according to officials briefed on them, was to set back Tehran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more.”

Essentially, President Donald Trump communicated to Israel that the U.S. would not support them in their plans, while opening up greater lines of communication with Iran possibly to negotiate a new deal related to its nuclear program (the former nuclear deal, negotiated by President Barack Obama, was shredded by Trump during his first term in 2018, but it looks a bit like second-term Trump might settle for something that looks rather similar). Looked at one way, you could say Trump’s approach is a bit schizophrenic, with administration officials not totally aligned on which goals they’re actually pursuing. Looked at another, you could say the less-hawkish forces are exerting significant influence behind the scenes, which bodes well.

Scenes from New York: Mayoral candidate (and current state representative) Zohran Mamdani plans to increase corporate taxes by 4.5 percent, which he predicts would add $5.4 billion to city coffers. “Another $4 billion would come from the increased taxes on the wealthy, with additional income flowing in by beefing up the city’s tax collection agency,” adds The New York Post. Mamdani advocates city-run grocery stores, expanded free childcare, fare-free buses, and rent freezes. He also seems to believe that you can just levy infinite taxes on the wealthy without them ever wising up, moving their money elsewhere, or fleeing the city altogether.

• “SpaceX is leading a bid to build Golden Dome with startups Anduril and Palantir, six people said,” reports Reuters, which would include “a constellation of 400 to more than 1,000 missile defense satellites.”
• “A team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth,” reports The New York Times. “A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae. ‘It is in no one’s interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,’ said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study, at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group’s observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life. ‘This is a revolutionary moment,’ Dr. Madhusudhan said. ‘It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.’”
• This is really disturbing:

I’m furious.

We’ve gotten official word that “several” students at my college have had their visas pulled (among the hundreds reported across the country). No reasons given. My school is about as activist as a jar of peanut butter.

My other international students are worried.…

— Carl (@HistoryBoomer) April 15, 2025

• Agree:

I think it should be bigger news that a domestic terrorist tried to murder a Jewish governor and his family on the first night of Passover because the perp was made about “the Palestinians.” This is what “globalizing the intifada” means in practice, and all those who have been…

— David Bernstein (@ProfDBernstein) April 16, 2025

Reporting today pretty consistent that this was a straightforward attempt to assassinate a Jewish governor and his family on Passover out of revenge for the Palestinians. We’ll see what else emerges obviously, but if that’s where this is headed it’s a bad, bad place. pic.twitter.com/zuJJWGNYh4

— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) April 16, 2025

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