One of the first news stories I read this morning was about Nicole Micheroni, a Boston lawyer, a citizen, who was told by the Department of Homeland Security to leave the country.
If she doesn't, "We will find you," the email threatened. Ms. Micheroni, an immigration lawyer, was born in the United States and is a citizen. The DHS has said it was a mistake.
And then I read Heather Cox Richardson's Letter From an American today. It's about the administration snatching people off the street and sending them to a for-profit prison without due process. The Supreme Court ruled that they cannot do that
Here's Heather Cox Richardson. I will be calling my reps today, like I did last week. On my day off, I will protest.
---
This
evening, lawyers for the Department of Justice told a federal court
that the administration does not believe it has a legal obligation to
return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite a
court order to do so.
The
29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. about 2011 when he was 16 to
escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled
in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there
until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to
be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After a hearing, an
immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be
sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang
had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his
family’s pupusa business.”
Ever
since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He
lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged
with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work
permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal
apprentice.
On
March 12, ICE agents pulled his car over, told his wife to come pick up
their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia, pressing him to say
he was a member of MS-13. On March 15 the government rendered Abrego
Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison for terrorists in El Salvador,
alleged to be the site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial
killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to
incarcerate the individuals it sends there.
On March 24, Abrego Garcia’s family sued the administration over his removal.
On
March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of
Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but said he
couldn’t be brought back because, in El Salvador, he is outside the
jurisdiction of the United States. It also accused him of being a member
of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would
threaten the public.
On
April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government
to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7.
In
her opinion, filed April 6, Judge Xinis wrote that “[a]lthough the
legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El
Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is
categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his
arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly
lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet
administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they
can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons
outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to
effectuate return because they are no longer the 'custodian,' and the
Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”
The
administration had already appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme
Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on Thursday, April 10, requiring
the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from
custody in El Salvador,” but asking the district court to clarify what
it meant by “effectuate,” that release, noting that it must give “due
regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of
foreign affairs.”
The
Supreme Court also ordered that “the Government should be prepared to
share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of
further steps.” Judge Xinis ordered the government to file an update by
9:30 a.m. on April 11 explaining where Abrego Garcia is, what the
government is doing to get him back, and what more it will do. She
planned an in-person hearing at 1:00 p.m.
But
the administration evidently does not intend to comply. On April 11,
the lawyer representing the government, Drew Ensign, said he did not
have information about where Abrego Garcia is and ignored her order to
provide information about what the government was doing to bring him
back. Saturday, it said Abrego Garcia is “alive and secure” in CECOT.
Today, it said it had no new information about him, but said that Abrego
Garcia is no longer eligible for the immigration judge’s order not to
send him to El Salvador “because of his membership in MS-13 which is now
a designated foreign terrorist organization.”
There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.
Today,
administration lawyers used the Supreme Court’s warning that the court
must give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in
the conduct of foreign affairs” to lay out a chilling argument. They
ignored the Supreme Court’s agreement that the government must get
Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador, as well as the court’s requirement
that the administration explain what it’s doing to make that happen.
Instead,
the lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the
country, any attempt to get him back would intrude on the president’s
power to conduct foreign affairs. Similarly, they argue that the
president cannot be ordered to do anything but remove domestic obstacles
from Abrego Garcia’s return. Because Nayib Bukele, the president of El
Salvador, is currently in the U.S. for a visit with Trump, they suggest
they will not share any more updates about Abrego Garcia and the court
should not ask for them because it would intrude on “sensitive” foreign
policy issues.
Let’s
be very clear about exactly what’s happening here: President Donald J.
Trump is claiming the power to ignore the due process of the law
guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal,
kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that
there is no way to get that person back.
All
people in the United States are entitled to due process, but Trump and
his officers have tried to convince Americans that noncitizens are not.
They have also pushed the idea that those they are offshoring are
criminals, but a Bloomberg investigation showed
that of the 238 men sent to CECOT in the first group, only five of them
had been charged with or convicted of felony assault or gun violations.
Three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft. Two were
charged with human smuggling. In any case, in the U.S., criminals are
entitled to due process.
Make
no mistake: as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and
Ketanji Brown Jackson recently warned, if the administration can take
noncitizens off the streets, render them to prison in another country,
and then claim it is helpless to correct the error either because the
person is out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction, it could do the same thing
to citizens.
Trump
has said he would “love” to do exactly that, and would even be
“honored” to, and Bukele has been offering to hold U.S. citizens. Dasha
Burns and Myah Ward of Politico reported Friday
that former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince is pitching a plan to expand
renditions to El Salvador to at least 100,000 criminal offenders from
U.S. prisons and to avoid legal challenges by making part of CECOT
American territory, then leasing it back to El Salvador to run.
When
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says, “The president's
idea for American citizens to potentially be deported, these would be
heinous violent criminals who have broken our nation's laws repeatedly,"
remember that just days ago, Trump suggested that a former government
employee was guilty of treason for writing a book about his time in the
first Trump administration that Trump claimed was “designed to sow chaos
and distrust” in the government.
Here’s
the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the
law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game.
You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than
others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law
with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your
approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all
you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.
At
least some people understand this. The president of North America’s
Building Trades Unions, Sean McGarvey, received a standing ovation when
he said to a room full of his fellow union workers: “We need to make our
voices heard. We’re not red, we’re not blue. We’re the building trades,
the backbone of America. You want to build a $5 billion data center?
Want more six-figure careers with health care, retirement, and no
college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk, you call us!... And yeah, that
means all of us. All of us. Including our brother [International
Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers]
apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and
his family now! Bring him home!”
—
Notes:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.31.0.pdf
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.65.0.pdf
https://apnews.com/article/who-is-abrego-garcia-e1b2af6528f915a1f0ec60f9a1c73cdd
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance Late
this afternoon, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 response to the
government’s application to vacate federal District Judge Paula Xinis’
order that the Trump administration return Kilmar Abrego Garcia from
prison in El Salvador to the United States. Xinis had ordered him
returned by the end of the day on Monday. The Supreme Court let him sit
for an ad…
3 days ago · 3264 likes · 348 comments · Joyce Vance
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.64.0.pdf
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-records-show-about-migrants-sent-to-salvadoran-prison-60-minutes-transcript/
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-04-10/about-90-of-migrants-sent-to-el-salvador-lacked-u-s-criminal-record
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-09/about-90-of-migrants-sent-to-salvador-lacked-us-criminal-record
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/will-the-trump-administration-try-to-deport-u-s-citizens-trump-has-floated-the-idea/3890350/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addressing-risks-associated-with-an-egregious-leaker-and-disseminator-of-falsehoods/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/el-salvador-prisons-warning-americans-trump-1235309721/
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/11/military-contractors-prison-plan-detained-immigrants-erik-prince-00287208
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-el-salvador-us-citizens-denaturalization-1235315975/
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/10/nx-s1-5358421/supreme-court-abrego-garcia-deportation-decision
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
Youtube:
watch?v=K31tuX1JnE0
Bluesky:
rgoodlaw.bsky.social/post/3lmpyntbijk2v
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