Last month, a federal judge tossed the federal criminal case against Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who became nationally known last year after the Trump administration acknowledged having illegally deported him to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador along with a larger set of Latino men that seemed to have been randomly snatched up by federal agents despite the government’s evidence-free insistence that they were all hardened gang members.
All of these removals were illegal, but Ábrego García’s was most obviously, glaringly so, on account of the fact that an immigration judge had specifically ruled that he could not be returned to El Salvador, where he would face danger. After a separate federal judge ordered his return, the government dragged its feet for months, insisting absurdly it had no custody over him before abruptly flying him back and immediately hitting him with criminal human smuggling charges—which were dismissed under an extremely rare finding of vindictive prosecution.
That doesn’t mean the 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice is out of the woods. The government is still trying to deport him, having rejected his offer to be removed to Costa Rica and instead gunning to send him to Liberia, where he’s never been, after an effort to deport him to Uganda, where he’s also never been. Every time there’s a new twist in this saga, I see people asking the same basic questions: Are they being serious? Is the administration still expending resources, over a year-plus, in a fanatical attempt to screw over this one guy? Why?
I think there’s an answer, and it’s a different one from that of many of the administration’s other targets in its weaponization of its power. While Ábrego García’s case is often lumped in with the attempts to investigate or prosecute people like former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, former Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell, and Senator Mark Kelly, I think there are clear differences in both intent and result, which stem ultimately from an analysis of their relative power.
Naturally, each of these efforts is an outrage in its own right, and not just in a “violating our sacred norms and decorum” kind of way. The spurious attempted railroadings of James, Powell, and Kelly are attempts to wrestle control of parts of the government or civil society that Trump has not been able to fully take by force or subservience—local prosecutors, the central bank, and parts of the Senate, respectively. Every single one is a direct shot at the foundations of our system of government, just in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary.
These people, though, will ultimately all be fine. Each have gone into an incredibly high-profile and powerful role in government, and while they didn’t and shouldn’t have expected to be criminally investigated for their trouble, they knew they were to some extent playing the game, one that has only gotten more dangerous in the Trump era. For good or ill, elected officials and high government functionaries at all levels, particularly those who are pro-democracy and willing to do something about it, should be steeling themselves for an increased level of risk, perhaps more than they thought they signed up for. Politics these days is a perilous field (and those that aren’t prepared for that should step aside).
Ábrego García did not sign up for any such risk. Everything we know about him points to his being a relatively run-of-the-mill Maryland dad that—while having had some acute personal struggles at times in his life—seemed, until his detention, to be focused mainly on learning the sheet metal trade and raising his son. If he’s become a fixation of the federal government, it’s not really because of anything he personally did. Instead, he has become this idée fixe because of something that was done to him. Or, if you prefer, he’s now famous for what his travails have come to represent: The Millerite campaign of savagery is indiscriminate, it is sloppy, and the government is, in fact, making serious mistakes that enormously impact people’s lives. He is a living, high-stakes symbol of Trumpian misrule and this administration’s need to break its opponents on the rack of authoritarianism.
The admission of an “administrative error” that triggered Ábrego García’s removal to the notorious CECOT gulag remains one of the few times I can remember when this innately combative and contemptuous administration has acknowledged in any public forum that it made a significant mistake. This was all the more disorienting in the context of a situation where it was sending, without any acknowledged legal basis whatsoever, people to be held in kind-of-but-also-kind-of-not U.S. custody at a foreign mega-prison with no due process. The admission of Ábrego García’s unlawful deportation was a crack in a carefully constructed facade of righteously deployed power for which the administration has never forgiven him.
In that way, he has become the most acute example of this phenomenon—but certainly not the only one. Mahmoud Khalil certainly involved himself more in political life than Ábrego García did, but it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that he was a campus activist and negotiator at one university campus, admittedly one of the most high-profile sites of pro-Palestinian organizing. Still, he was little known outside that scene until he was actually detained. I do not in any way intend to minimize his dedication and his activism in saying that it seems clear the Trump administration did not engineer his arrest as a way to decapitate Palestinian activism or take a significant public opponent off the board.
As Khalil himself told me when I spoke with him for this magazine last year, he had expected to potentially incur the wrath of the administration (and he certainly did). He never considered that his activism would draw the individualized attention of the federal government, and while he doesn’t at all regret his work, this is a level of consequence neither he nor anyone had really gamed out. Rather, his detention was a signal—you might think you’re not a big enough fish to warrant a heavy-handed response, but that response might come anyway.
To this you can add the so-called Broadview Six, an assortment of individuals that include a congressional candidate, her aide, several local elected officials and candidates, and a musician. The Six were all charged with felonies, including conspiracy, after a September protest outside an ICE holding facility in Broadview, Illinois, in which an ICE vehicle was mildly damaged. The defendant pool was whittled down to four people facing misdemeanors before the case was dismissed altogether amid questions about federal prosecutors’ conduct with the grand jury. Still, the months of uncertainty and legal bills took a toll on all of them, just as the specter of prosecution and deportation have taken a toll on Khalil and Ábrego García, who are not insulated by high public office and connections.
These committed efforts to throw the massive weight of the federal government against not just potent political enemies but individuals who, at least in the case of Ábrego García, don’t seem to have any public political bearing at all are not coming out of nowhere. It is a tried and true method among authoritarians, of making clear to the population that while any given person might be unlikely to find themselves in these terrifying crosshairs, it absolutely can happen to you, and so maybe you should work assiduously to avoid drawing that unwelcome attention.
Most anyone who’s had even a cursory brush with the adversarial power of the state knows how jarring it can be, whether that’s being pulled over or audited or investigated in some way. These interactions might be quickly resolved, but while they’re ongoing, the awesome power of the state and the stark imbalance between you and it put themselves in acute relief. Now imagine that this stretches beyond any one particular interaction and becomes an all-encompassing monthslong ordeal where every legal victory against the state’s vexations leads to the government doubling down again and again, with the goal of depleting resources and willpower even when putatively unsuccessful. It is the legal procedural equivalent of a head on a stake outside the castle doors: a warning to the others, to everyone.
While Trump’s malicious series of attempted prosecutions and investigations so far have been framed as an abject failure—and, from a pure legal perspective, they have been a litany of embarrassing disasters that have damaged the Justice Department indelibly—it’s quite possible that, at chilling speech and political action, they’ve been more successful than we can see on the surface. That is a Trump legacy that will be difficult to repair.
