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MAKA

Published by digby on April 1, 2025

Making America Kafkaesque Again

“The Trial” — Wolfgang Lettl 1981

This is the very reason why we have due process of law:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.

But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.

The reason he went to the U.S. in the first place was to escape the MS-13 gang with whom he’s now imprisoned in that gulag. If he manages to survive, I’d assume he will be required to join them now.

This is not the first “mistake” they’ve made but it’s the first they’ve admitted to. Not that it will make any difference. They’ll almost certainly claim that because he is a Salvadoran citizen they have no jurisdiction over him. It’s beyond a catch-22.

And then there’s this. He is the King, after all:

Trump administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.

This is your dangerous criminal:

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

That’s the “administrative error.”

This is getting so bad that even some of our country’s most important and revered leaders are speaking out:

JD Vance responded to the criticism:

“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read, he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”

No he was not. But the right is all high fiving this supposed put-away shot and calling it all a fake news “sob-story.”

There are a whole bunch of these so-called “sob-stories” emerging because Kristi noem’s ICE is obviously just picking up any Venezuelan or Salvadoran male with a tattoo and calling them a gang member.

One of the documents contained in Friday’s filing titled Alien Enemies Act: Alien Enemy Validation Guide, provides a checklist of 20 observations divided into six categories. The categories include judicial outcomes, criminal conduct and information and symbolism.

Each observation has an assigned value ranging from two points, up to 10 points. According to the document, migrants who have a total score of eight points or higher “are validated as members of TDA,” and will be issued a “Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal Under the Alien Enemies Act.”

“Aliens scoring 6 or 7 points may be validated as members of TDA; you should consult with a supervisor and (Office of the Principal Legal Advisor), reviewing the totality of the facts, before making that determination,” the checklist instructions state.

Homeland Security Investigations, and local law enforcement agencies such as the Texas Department of Public Safety, have said Tren de Aragua members have tattoos showing a variety of images, including AK-47s, trains, clocks, crowns, stars, and the Jumpman logo, used to promote the Air Jordan basketball sneakers.

You know who does have some very disturbing tattoos? The Secretary of Defense:

The AK 47 under the flag is very special message. And Deus Vult is a far-right extremist war cry, taken from the medieval Christian crusades.

But they’re sending people to a gulag for having a soccer ball tattoo.

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