US accidentally sent Maryland father to Salvadorian prison, can't get him back
159 comments
·April 1, 2025fabian2k
EasyMark
I find it's more about harming others than helping their own with the new administration, it's very much delighting in the pain of others rather than pursuing a better future or more sane politics.
UncleMeat
Absolutely. You don't send administration leaders for photo ops in front of prisoners or share AI images of people crying as they are arrested unless glee at the suffering of others is part of the point.
At least with Abu Ghraib the message from leadership was that it was rogue individuals doing bad things. Whether this was actually true is another question, but at least the Bush admin felt it was important to say "this behavior is wrong." Now we've got messaging from the administration saying "look at how much pain we can inflict."
tvaughan
This isn’t an accident. They said they’d do this. People voted for this. This is what some people want to happen. No one should be surprised by this. On the campaign trail Trump promised to deport 20 million people. They’re aren’t 20 million undocumented people in the US. The only way you can deport 20 million people is to deport a lot people who have no reason whatsoever to be deported.
woleium
What do you mean no reason? They have the wrong skin colour or the wrong accent or they said something derogatory about the regime, or maybe they just thought it.
throw0101b
> It's not an accident if the government intentionally circumvents all checks that usually would apply to cases like this and denies them due process. It's also intentional that they send these people to a prison in a different country […]
Ironically, from the Declaration of Independence:
> Grievance 18: "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Jury trial:"
> Grievance 19: "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
Also, given January 6:
> Grievance 27: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us […]
anal_reactor
It's a demonstration that party's over, "damn illegals will be deported". Yes, the government knows that the deportation was unjust, what about that?
bigyabai
It's a poor demonstration, then?
anal_reactor
No, why? Everyone's talking about it, half of the people are outraged, the other half cheer, exactly the expected result.
facile3232
> with conditions that would certainly be illegal in the US itself.
Why would you assume this? We're also under investigation for human rights abuses in our prisons. AFAIK most of the rights you have as a prisoner are civil rights.
mcv
This is why due process is essential for everybody. The moment you deny it to one group, you can deny it to anyone by claiming they're in that one group.
jrs235
I do believe the whole concept of beyond A reasonable doubt was based upon the belief that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to suffer. What is happening is a slap in the face of our foundational principles and justice system.
timeon
> I do believe the whole concept of beyond A reasonable doubt was based upon the belief that it is better for 10 guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to suffer.
Societies that do believe in this do not have capital punishment. It seems to me from the outside that US have different priorities. Like with school-shootings - apparently that is worth it there.
xracy
At the very least this has been a hotly contested conversation for a while in the US. I do still believe it's a founding principle of the US' legal system.
milesrout
[flagged]
tim333
Even if they don't use a legal process, if behaving decently they should be prepared in cases like this to say opps, our bad, we'll bring him back.
Behaving decently would actually help the objective of sending a lot of illegals home. People then might say ok to that, but this way there'll be a lot of resistance to the process.
rchaud
Due process exists. The ability to compel a government to respect it does not exist.
BLKNSLVR
Accidents like this are required in order to demonstrate the scale of the "will" behind the power.
This should be a un-ignorable reminder of the value of due process. Better a guilty person go free than an innocent person sent to their long, slow, undignified death.
xracy
Guilty people go free all the time, as long as they have enough money. We live with the guilty people free.
The least the system could do is more to guarantee the innocent person being free too.
Ntrails
> Better a guilty person go free than an innocent person sent to their long, slow, undignified death.
This is a scale thing though right? You'll have some false convictions if you want a justice system. Nothing is perfect, breakage inevitable.
Nobody wants to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice themselves, but everyone wants crime to be dealt with effectively. The trade offs are real and I suspect the average person has an acceptable non-zero rate in the back of their mind
BLKNSLVR
Yes, as you said, the price of any justice system is a percentage of results that are wrong. I think the checks and balances that have been developed over the last century or two have gotten to a satisfactory level.
Such that wilfully bypassing parts of it to support a political agenda is nothing less than dictatorial.
scarecrowbob
"You'll have some false convictions if you want a justice system. Nothing is perfect, breakage inevitable."
Perhaps this is an assumption you are making which is not true.
_DeadFred_
They said there were how many tens of thousands of these gang members? And these are the first, highest priority ones they choose to ship out? If their highest priority test cases are this crappy/low priority/not actual criminals, imagine when they get past the first ten thousand.
null
computerthings
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ReptileMan
>This should be a un-ignorable reminder of the value of due process
I agree with you.
Now explain how can we scale the due process to deport everyone that entered here illegally in a reasonable timeframe. 15-30 million hearings will take a century to be resolved.
The system is not designed for such massive load in mind.
pjc50
> 15-30 million hearings
What level of false positives are you willing to tolerate - US nationals wrongly deported?
How many fatalities (including suicides) are you willing to tolerate in this process?
(fairly easy to imagine hypothetical situation: lawful US national gun owner with Hispanic name is shopped to immigration by his neighbours. ICE come to his house in the middle of the night to deprive him of his rights. Is he (a) legally (b) morally entitled to open fire on them? If not, what do all the 2nd amendment tyranny resistors mean? If so, isn't this going to be a huge mess?)
codewench
>Is he (a) legally (b) morally entitled to open fire on them?
Given how these "arrests" seem to be done by plainclothes individuals who don't identify themselves?
Yes. Legally (depending on state) yes, and morally always.
(Arrests in quotations because anyone arrested has rights, something that seems to be skipped over here)
ReptileMan
He shows his id and they say sorry to disturb you sir.
BLKNSLVR
If it's so important to get done quickly, hire more people to do it. Move resources to solve the most pressing problems first.
Otherwise let law/justice take as long as law/justice takes.
ReptileMan
>Otherwise let law/justice take as long as law/justice takes.
Once again I agree with you. Let's deport them first and make remote immigration courts in every US embassy. This way they have remedy for false positives, and let law/justice take as long as law/justice takes
UncleMeat
Too bad.
"We don't have the resources to give that many people their full legal rights" should not be followed by "so we will deny them their rights." The government could massively expand the number of immigration courts or otherwise massively increase resourcing that goes into processing these cases. Otherwise they can get fucked. Legal rights make the job of law enforcement more difficult. That's a good thing.
foogazi
> Now explain how can we scale the due process to deport everyone that entered here illegally in a reasonable timeframe.
No - you explain why you need to do this within any timeframe
maxerickson
Just scale the system as needed.
If the idea is that we are deporting people that are here illegally, it shouldn't be controversial to require some degree of evidence and a brief examination of that evidence by someone not immediately connected to gathering it, and some kind of oversight structure.
9dev
And how long will it take to process the illegal Immigration of all the Europeans that entered the American continent 300 years ago..?
ReptileMan
We were conquerors. Vae Victis.
rurp
A good place to start would be to not abruptly fire hundreds of deportation judges and staff. It's absurd to claim that this administration is actually trying to solve a problem, their actions clearly show that they are not. These deportation circus events are about terrorizing people and make some alt-right scumbags on the internet happy.
_DeadFred_
Convict employers of workers not allowed to work legally and people will self deport. Oh but that would convict the wrong sort of criminal. We don't go after the criminals that exploit an underclass, that hire illegals so they can avoid paying into social security, that hire illegals so they can pay under required wages, that hire illegals so that they can exploit them all kinds of ways. Instead you propose we deny due process to gay barbers and send them to overseas concentration camps as step one (ignoring the administration can't even fill the first batch of a few hundred out of tens of thousands of claimed 'gangbangers' with actual criminals).
lores
Implement Lex Talionis for gross misconduct in public office. Did an official, through gross negligence, cause irreparable harm to innocents? Mete the same harm upon them; then empathy may stop being a weakness.
/s, but I became less sure of it as I typed.
occamrazor
FYI: Lex, not Rex.
But a Rex Talionis is an interesting concept too.
lores
Oops, brain fart. Fixing it, thanks!
memtet
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memtet
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croes
That’s the most vicious part
> sent a Salvadorian immigrant to a notorious Salvadorian prison
>the man had protected immigration status in the U.S., specifically barring him from being sent back to that country for fear of persecution.
disqard
The cruelty is the point.
bufferoverflow
No sympathy for MS-13 gang members.
UncleMeat
Yeah, throw all the people who like the Chicago Bulls into a pit for the rest of their lives /s.
ravenstine
My first thought seeing this headline: "Please don't tell me he got sent to CECOT."
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to mistakenly sending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT prison.
:O
If you haven't heard of CECOT, go watch one of the recent YouTube videos on it. I'm glad that El Salvador has taken control over gang activity but, man, CECOT is one of the last places on earth you want to end up.
spacemadness
Sounds like the perfect place to send people when you want to scare people into feigning support for you and to fear you. You know, like a fascist dictator would do.
tastyface
> I'm glad that El Salvador has taken control over gang activity
> Abrego Garcia’s family has had no contact with him since he was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador, known as the CECOT. His wife spotted her husband in news photographs released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on the morning of March 16, after a U.S. District Judge had told the Trump administration to halt the flights. “Oopsie,” Bukele wrote on social media, taunting the judge.
The man is nothing more than a tyrant with a smile, and now his concentration camp will be used to house whoever pays him or gets in his way, not just alleged gang members. He's already in power unconstitutionally: https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-elections-bukele-demo...
Now it may take decades for Salvadorans to rid themselves of this dictatorship.
forinti
I just hope that the images we get are for show and that normally they let human beings actually walk upright and don't slap them around willy-nilly.
namaria
> ICE maintains that a confidential informant told the agency the man was a member of MS-13
Well this is horrifying.
ninjin
Indeed. If only there was some sort of process where there would be fact finding and ultimately be put beyond all reasonable doubt whether a claim like this is true before sending someone off to prison. Even better, there ought to be a constitution or maybe even universal declaration guaranteeing such a process.
croes
The same kind of informants who identified the prisoners for Guantanamo.
BLKNSLVR
There are growing numbers of informants, admittedly though these are off-current-topic:
Canary Mission: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts...
Betar US: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/25/what-is-betar-us-th...
It's a low bar, just so long as you're informing on a group that's not in lock-step with Trump's agenda.
SauciestGNU
Canary and Betar need to be held socially and legally responsible for the harms they are causing. And if they do have links to Israeli intelligence, they should be criminally tried for espionage and violating FARA.
sebazzz
The “foreign agent” card.
aoeusnth1
Of course, this is flagged by the reactionary contingent on this site.
jmpman
If the person was an actual US citizen, they wouldn’t be able to get them back? Now they were able to exchange an arms dealer for a pot smoking basketball player in Russia. Why can’t they do the same in Salvador?
ahoka
A judge granted him a "Withholding of Removal", which should have prevented deportation to El Salvador.
tim333
I'm sure the US could get any of the people sent to El Salvador back if they asked. They are paying El Salvador to take and keep the people after all.
croes
Strange how tariffs and sanctions are suddenly not an option, especially because the US pays El Salvador to imprison the Venezuelan „gang members“
Terr_
> The Trump administration argues that because the man is no longer in U.S. custody, a U.S. court lacks jurisdiction to issue orders regarding his detention and release.
That's evil and stupid.
By that twisted logic, the President can ship all the gold in Fort Knox to a Russian bank under his own name, and US courts "won't have jurisdiction" to rule that it must be returned.
mcv
That's also how the US used to justify torture in Guantanamo Bay. It wasn't US soil, so the prisoners there didn't have the rights and protections that US law and constitution would otherwise give them.
pjc50
Guantanamo Bay is the real bipartisan moral stain here. It was set up exactly to cause this kind of situation, for the extralegal punishment of people deemed to be terrorists.
People claim that Obama "couldn't" close it, but I think DOGE have demonstrated with USAID that the President absolutely could have closed it by executive order and simply cutting off the pay of everyone there.
krapp
>but I think DOGE have demonstrated with USAID that the President absolutely could have closed it by executive order and simply cutting off the pay of everyone there
You're assuming the system would have been as compliant with Obama as they are with Trump, but I doubt that would have been the case. Congress passed a law to make it illegal for Obama to close Gitmo and simply refused to allow it, but their hands are mysteriously tied WRT Trump and DOGE.
watwut
Tho, the level of law breaking by DOGE and Trump himself is unprecedented. Obviously Obama could became fascist as much as they are going, he could sieg heil too ... but him not being as far as them is a good thing about Obama. I am fine with the idea that it was an excuse back then. But, the "he could do the same anti-democratic anti-rule-of-law" decisions as Trump and Obama is not much argument.
Second, Obama did not had supreme court saying "president is above the law and can break it" nor would right wing supreme court justices voted for it. Trump has that ruling, because his politics matches the one of the right wing supreme court justices.
Third, Obama had actual opposition. Conservatives and republicans were opposing EVERYTHIGN he was doing. And had power to do so. Including when he adopted their own ideas. They even threw massive fit about suit of a wrong color. Right now, republicans have all the power including , majority in supreme court, so there are not checks or balances.
jfengel
At least in El Salvador, he's got access to the (notoriously crappy) Salvadorian courts, and the protections granted by the Salvadorian constitution. It's not much, but it's something.
Camp X-Ray was specifically designed to be nobody's jurisdiction. They have nothing.
That is utterly shameful. It brings back reminders of our slave-owning past, where human beings were deprived even of the ownership of their own bodies.
ZeroGravitas
Even then I believe they avoided even transiting via US soil to maintain this thin figleaf of legal protection for torture.
pavlov
The president nowadays has immunity for official acts, so he can ship the gold to Russia anyway if he signs an executive order saying it’s necessary for world peace.
anigbrowl
Have you noticed how this lack of jurisdiction never seems to come up when the US wants to prosecute someone located abroad?
Mordisquitos
Not only that, but it's also inconsistent with the U.S. administration expecting non-US businesses to comply with executive orders even when operating in other countries [0]:
> An executive order that Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office instructs federal contractors not to engage in D.E.I., which the order described as “illegal discrimination.” The letter to French businesses said the order “applies to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.”
[0] https://apnews.com/article/french-companies-dei-letter-us-tr...
It's not an accident if the government intentionally circumvents all checks that usually would apply to cases like this and denies them due process. It's also intentional that they send these people to a prison in a different country (and for most of them not the country they are originally from) with conditions that would certainly be illegal in the US itself.
This is also about more than just this single case. From the little we know so far it seems that being from Venezuela and having any kind of tattoo is sufficient to be targeted.