Been down one time
Justice isn't dead. Not yet.
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“Kilmar Abrego Garcia is never coming back to the United States.”
“We couldn’t bring him back if we wanted to.”
“Are you proposing that we invade El Salvador?”
So said President and convicted felon Donald Trump and members of his administration, with sneers a’plenty, after mistakenly sending a Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to an El Salvadoran prison, then refusing a Supreme Court order — a 9-0 ruling — to facilitate his return.
As it turns out, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being returned to the United States, the Department of Justice announced earlier today. This is a great victory for lovers of democracy and a great defeat for the overreaching Trump administration.
As Rep. Don Beyer put it in a tweet:
The Trump Administration always had the power to bring Kilmar Abrego back. They were always lying about this, all of it was lies.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mistakenly-deported-kilmar-abrego-garcia-back-us-face/story?id=121333122…
They chose to disobey court orders because they are authoritarians who regard the Constitution as an inconvenience.
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It’s hard to argue with that, especially as Trump whines that following the Constitution would be too hard: “… then we’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials.”
Yes. Yes, we would. That’s how it works, Mr. President.
The DOJ also says that Garcia will be tried for crimes — which I’d like to say is just fine. That’s how it should be.
But the crimes of which he’s accused, human trafficking — essentially driving illegal immigrants from one place to another — allegedly occurred in 2022. The DOJ had three years to charge him and didn’t.
And these people are best characterized as “vindictive.”
So it sounds a little … trumped up to me. But Garcia will have his day in court, so I guess we’ll see.
And it’ll be interesting to see where Attorney General Pam Bondi’s career goes from here.
The bottom line is that this isn’t really about Garcia; it’s about us. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about whether our country is going to be what it says it is or if it’s all just jingoistic bullshit that gets tossed aside when the scapegoat’s skin is brown.
The jury is still out.
In the meantime, this one goes out to Bondi:
A new “Meditations” essay is marinading for Sunday; I hope you have a good weekend. Stay safe and sane.