Ábrego García: Why the White House blinked

Finally, a "win for the rule of law," said the New York Daily News in an editorial. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced last week that Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland father of three who was shipped to a prison in his native El Salvador in March, is now back on U.S. soil. The undocumented migrant's deportation was clearly illegal: A 2019 court order barred his removal to El Salvador due to fear of persecution. But for three months, the Trump administration defied judicial orders to "facilitate" Ábrego García's return—including one from the Supreme Court—coyly claiming the U.S. was powerless to interfere in El Salvador's custodial system. It eventually backed down amid warnings of a constitutional crisis. "But this being the Trump administration," Ábrego García, 29, is not a free man. Instead, he is suddenly facing multiple federal charges over allegations that he "unlawfully transported thousands of undocumented aliens" across the U.S. as a member of the street gang MS-13. "Whether the indictment is solid or not, Ábrego García will now have competent legal defense and will be before independent judges." He will have all the protections that are due to him under the Constitution, protections he lost during his "disappearance" to El Salvador.

This is "not the homecoming Ábrego García hoped for," said Jonathan Turley in FoxNews.com. If convicted on these serious charges, which include accusations that he smuggled guns and narcotics, he will face life in prison. As for the administration, it's ended this controversy "on its own terms": neither defying the courts nor conceding limits on its power to deport. Democrats, meanwhile, have committed "a historic political blunder," said Peter Laffin in the Washington Examiner. They spent months insisting Ábrego García was a model citizen swept up in Trump's "supposedly racist deportation scheme." But during his trial, prosecutors will detail his alleged trafficking of women and children and how his wife repeatedly accused him of domestic violence. Each "hideous new detail" will remind voters of his "beatification" by "the party of open borders."

That assumes the government is "telling the truth about Ábrego García," said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate, and "there are reasons to be skeptical." If prosecutors had proof of criminal wrongdoing, why didn't they reveal it back in March and spare themselves months of scandal? More to the point, why wasn't he arrested in 2022? Most of the trafficking charges in the indictment stem from an incident that year in Tennessee, when cops found Ábrego García driving an SUV with nine male Hispanic passengers. (Ábrego García said he was headed to a construction site). He wasn't detained that day, let alone charged, and Bondi will have to explain what's changed since then, other than Trump's election, and "his suddenly urgent desire to find a justification for his blatantly unlawful rendition program."

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Some Democrats did go overboard trying "to portray Ábrego García as sympathetic," said Jason Willick in The Washington Post. But "this story was never about a particular migrant's character." It's about whether the president can "send people from U.S. soil to foreign prisons and hold them there even when courts say it is illegal." That question remains terrifyingly unresolved, said Ilya Somin in Reason. Ábrego García's return proves the administration is not yet entirely resistant to judicial and public pressure. But Trump has deported "hundreds of other migrants" without due process. It's now up to the courts—" and the rest of us"—to push for their return, and "ensure that such a thing can never happen again."