Abrego Garcia Should Be Returned from El Salvador

The court fight over Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a most unusual one in that no one denies that the government violated the law in deporting him.

Abrego Garcia, a national of El Salvador who was here illegally, was removed from the United States along with alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members from Venezuela who were deported to a Salvadoran prison in a rush last month. While the administration invoked the Alien Enemy Act as to the Venezuelans and similarly deported them without due process (erroneously so, according to the Supreme Court), it claimed based on scant evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 — another vicious international criminal enterprise that the administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Inevitably, skipping ordinary procedural checks, the administration made at least one mistake in deporting Abrego Garcia, and probably many others.