Littwin: U.S. mistakenly deported a court-protected migrant to El Salvador prison. But it shamefully says there’s nothing to be done about it.

Sometimes, the Trump/Musk cartel is incompetent, as in the clown-car, classified-documents episode known as Signalgate. 

Sometimes, it is ruthless, as in the snatch-and-grab kidnapping of the terrified Tufts Ph.D. student by ununiformed, unbadged, unidentified government agents.

Sometimes, it is extortionist, as in the threat to withhold funds, occasionally running to the billions of dollars, from universities unless they agree to do exactly what Trump/Musk demand.

Sometimes, it breaks all the rules just because it can, as in JD Vance’s recent trip to Greenland, where he threatened, once again, to annex the Danish territory. Trump has said he might use force, if necessary, to “get” Greenland — even if the force would be used against a NATO ally, which we happen to be sworn by treaty to, uh, protect. Vladimir Putin will be glad to hear that irony really is dead.

Sometimes, it launches a trade war — on so-called Liberation Day, which it insists is unrelated to April Fools’ Day — even though it threatens the health of the global economy and in many cases will be directed toward our closest allies. Why? Because Trump (and now Musk) is infatuated with tariffs, not to mention threatening allies.

Sometimes, it is simply cruel, when the cruelty, as Atlantic writer Adam Serwer famously observed, is the point.

So, we go back once again to El Salvador’s notorious prison, called “Terrorism Confinement Center” or CECOT — last discussed here when puppy killer and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was making her prison-porn video, with half-naked, tattooed Venezuelan prisoners as a backdrop.

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In a shocking story published in The Atlantic — yeah, those guys again — we learned that immigration agents have admitted they violated a court order, and also common decency, when shipping Venezuelan migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT by mistake, or, as they put it, due to “administrative error.”

And it gets worse. Government lawyers are saying that since Abrego Garcia is being held in CECOT — despite a court order saying he couldn’t be sent there — there’s nothing they can do about it. Oopsie? 

And worse still, those lawyers are fighting in court a demand that the U.S. officials somehow rectify the issue. Meaning they don’t want to do anything about getting him home from a prison where prisoners reportedly stay in their crowded cell for 23½ hours a day.

The idea that El Salvador would object to Abrego Garcia’s removal is a joke. We know who, as Trump likes to say, has the cards. And it’s not El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who is getting $6 million to house the Trump/Musk deportees. When Trump/Musk play cards, it’s always deuces wild. And, they like to think, they always win.

As far as we know, this is the first error that the immigrant agencies have copped to in the wake of the three planeloads  of Venezuelans — most of them allegedly connected to the Tren de Aragua gang — sent to El Salvador on March 15. Many such cases are working their way through the courts, including the case in which Trump/Musk willfully defied a judge by transporting the prisoners.

Tren de Aragua, you’ll remember, is the gang that Trump said had taken over Aurora and much of Colorado. That was a blatantly purposeful lie, but we can now say it was hardly the biggest lie.

Reporters from the New Yorker and Mother Jones and several other news outlets have identified prisoners — all of whom were deported without even a hint of due process — who seem to have been sent away simply by virtue of tattoos that the immigration services insist link them, often without real evidence, to violent Venezuelan gangs.

But in this case, Abrego Garcia fled Venezuelan gang violence in 2011, when he was 16, to come to the United States, where he has lived ever since. He has a good job and no criminal record. He’s married to a U.S. citizen with whom he has a 5-year-old autistic son, whom he was picking up when ICE came to arrest him.

Years ago, though, an informant identified Abrego Garcia as a member of the MS-13 gang. Abrego Garcia, declaring his innocence, was never even charged with a crime. But he was handed over to ICE to be deported anyway. When he applied for asylum in 2019, an immigration judge ruled Abrego Garcia could not be sent to El Salvador — granting him a “withholding of removal” status — because of the threat of violence or worse from gang members if he was sent there.

Well, now he’s there, due to ICE’s mistake in ignoring the ruling. His family is terrorized. We don’t know if Abrego Garcia is terrorized, but it’s safe to assume that he is. And nearly everyone admits that sending him there was a mistake — oh, everyone except JD Vance, who tweeted this reply to podcaster Jon Favreau: 

“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.”

It must have been Vance, though, who skipped the reading part, because nowhere in the filing does it say that Abrego Garcia was convicted of anything, much less of being a gang member.

And as Albrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, who like Vance graduated from Yale Law,  told Atlantic reporter Nick Miroff, “They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief. If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless — all of them — because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

Of course that’s how Trump/Musk view all laws, as more like guidelines to be broken at will. In the case of these deportations, Trump has cited the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which has been invoked three times in our history, each time more shamefully than the last. That last time, by the way, was to intern Japanese immigrants during World War II.

It was a disgraceful chapter in American history, but not in the world according to Trump/Musk. For them, invoking a harmful, and likely illegal, law because they can is just a day like any other.

Imagine, if you can, what the day might have been like for Abrego Garcia and his family.

Imagine, if you can, living in a country where the government admits it made a grievous mistake. And then shamelessly fights off the notion that it should try to help the person whose life it carelessly and unjustly and dishonorably upended — and very possibly destroyed.

Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

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