Violent foreign gangs are a threat
A majority of the people agree with what Donald Trump is doing to secure the border, according to the latest CBS News poll. That has liberals seething. They are desperate to fabricate a scandal they can exploit to restore the flood of illegal aliens into the country.
At a hearing Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin demanded the return of “people unlawfully taken to El Salvador on that so-called plane full of gangbangers.”
The Maryland Democrat was referring to a story in The Atlantic about a “Maryland father of three” whom the president unjustly condemned to a nasty Salvadoran prison cell without trial. The article’s author seized on the government’s acknowledgment that an “administrative error” was responsible for him being on the deportation flight in the first place.
After all, the accused man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, denies being a member of the violent MS-13 gang. It’s merely a coincidence that he is covered in the sorts of tattoos favored by Salvadoran criminal organizations. The left is trying to create the impression this upstanding individual was ousted in a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Not so. Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador nabbed in 2019 while loitering outside a Home Depot in Hyattsville. An immigration judge reviewed the evidence and determined he was a member of MS-13 and a danger to the community. She authorized his deportation, but she blocked sending him back to El Salvador after he suddenly claimed he would be persecuted there by an MS-13 rival known as Barrio 18.
Left-wing groups routinely instruct noncitizens to manufacture claims of persecution to evade being sent where they belong. Because verifying events thousands of miles away is impossible, sympathetic judges frequently accept the tales at face value.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged that an “oversight” allowed Abrego Garcia to be removed in contravention of the order, but the slipup was the destination, not the deportation. As the prisoner’s attorneys acknowledged in a court filing last week, “The government could have chosen to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia to any other country on earth,” just not to his home country.
This puts the Justice Department in the awkward position of acknowledging a misstep for which there is no remedy. U.S. courts have no authority over the foreign government holding Abrego Garcia. So, the true purpose of bringing the case is to persuade the district court judge, an appointee of President Obama, to halt all deportations lest another father of three be returned to the “wrong” country.
Vice President J.D. Vance pushed back on the misplaced sympathy for illegal aliens. “Their victims are measured in longer wait times for hospitals, overwhelmed schools, and murder victims the media largely ignored,” he wrote on X.
Abrego Garcia said he feared returning to El Salvador because of gang retaliation. Fortunately for him, President Nayib Bukele has arrested more than 80,000 outlaws in his unprecedented “state of exception” war against criminal syndicates. The streets are safer as a result, meaning there is no longer a reason for anyone who isn’t a gangbanger to avoid the country.
The public appreciates the consequences of criminality, and the administration’s policy is having an impact. Organized foreign crime rings realize capture earns them a one-way ticket to a cell in San Salvador. If the left finds such extreme measures distasteful, they have themselves to blame for leaving the border wide open and making them necessary.
— The Washington Times