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The Kafka-esque travails of Kilmar Abrego Garcia are well-known.
For more than three months, Abrego languished in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a place that a federal judge described as “one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western hemisphere.” Abrego got there because the Trump administration violated a court order to hustle him onto a plane to a place where he says he was immediately tortured.
Once returned, federal prosecutors charged Abrego with serious offenses and now appears to want to end-run allowing him to defend himself at a trial, vowing to deport him again if he is released on bail.
In a half-hour Substack Live from Monday, former U.S. Attorney
says that it would be natural, but a mistake, to view the situation as bleak.“So I know a lot of people are feeling depressed,” the author of the hugely popular newsletter
said. “This is another one of those moments where we worry quite legitimately that Trump has managed to break the rule of law. But I'll tell you all, I have a different take on it.”The Trump administration initially insisted that Abrego would never come back to the United States, only to reverse itself under the weight of numerous legal defeats going all the way up to the Supreme Court.
“It may not have been a fully satisfying decision, but they ordered the government to do its best to bring him back,” Joyce said. “And ultimately, this is the moment that we don't talk about enough: I think the government flinched here.”
The mere existence of the criminal proceedings attests to the Trump administration’s capitulation.
“The government had been saying all along, ‘Sorry, he's in [El Salvador strongman Nayib] Bukele's custody. He belongs to El Salvador. We can't bring him back.’ But they did it,” Joyce said.
“They did it because they understood that they had reached the limits of the American people's tolerance,” she added.
The day of Abrego’s arraignment, hundreds gathered outside the courthouse. Millions demonstrated the following day for the No Kings protests, demanding due process for all. Abrego’s fate remains unknown: Prosecutors made clear that immigration authorities will immediately seek his deportation, likely to a third country, if he is released on bail.
The current legal battles could be coming to a head on July 16, the day that Abrego may be released from pre-trial detention in Nashville, Tenn., and prosecutors say that the government will not wait for his criminal trial to seek his deportation.
Whatever the outcome, two things remain clear: Trump has faced a groundswell of pressure from the courts and public because of Abrego’s case, and that institutional and popular resistance already has changed the course of the case.
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