When she announced the criminal charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia in June, Attorney General Pam Bondi said he “has landed in the United States to face justice.” She said, “This is what American justice looks like.”
Bondi is correct that Abrego’s case is an example of “American justice” under the Trump administration — just not in the way she meant.
Had someone tuned into Bondi’s news conference without knowing the backstory, they might’ve gotten the misimpression that Abrego was a fugitive hiding out in a foreign country and that the government had finally captured him.
But he was only in his birth country of El Salvador because the U.S. had sent him there in March, in violation of a court order that barred his removal to that country for his fear of persecution there. The government sent him not only to El Salvador but to that country’s notorious terrorism prison, though he hadn’t even been charged with any crime. By the administration’s own admission, it made an “error.” But instead of quickly fixing it, as ordered by the courts, it resisted until it finally relented in June in the face of a civil lawsuit that Abrego’s lawyers filed for his return to Maryland, where he was living prior to his illegal removal.
But the administration didn’t return him to Maryland. It took him to Tennessee, where federal prosecutors had developed a criminal case against him while he was being held in El Salvador, where he said he was beaten and tortured. He pleaded not guilty to the charges of unlawfully transporting undocumented immigrants. The charges center on a 2022 traffic stop from which he was released at the time without charge. The Trump Justice Department’s decision to bring the case reportedly led a high-ranking Tennessee prosecutor to resign over concerns that the case was “pursued for political reasons.”
Indeed, had Abrego not been illegally sent to El Salvador and then fought for his lawful return, he likely never would’ve been indicted in Tennessee. His lawyers made that point last Tuesday in their motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that it’s based on vengeance.
After the government lost its motion to detain him pretrial, Abrego was released Friday, with the understanding that he would return to Maryland and face the prospect of removal proceedings — potentially lawfully this time.
But a court filing from Abrego’s lawyers over the weekend shows that the administration has taken its vengeance to a new level. According to the filing, on Thursday — the day before he would be released — the government told his counsel that if he agreed to stay in custody and plead guilty, then he could be deported to Costa Rica after he serves whatever sentence the court would impose. Like El Salvador, Costa Rica is a Spanish-speaking country in Central America.
As we know, Abrego declined to stay in jail because he was released Friday.
After his release, an immigration official said the government now wants to deport him to the African nation of Uganda. He was ordered to report to a Baltimore immigration office on Monday morning and was given until then either to accept the Costa Rica deal “or else that offer will be off the table forever,” Abrego’s lawyers wrote in the Saturday filing.
“There can be only one interpretation of these events,” they wrote of the offer, “the DOJ, DHS, and ICE are using their collective powers to force Mr. Abrego to choose between a guilty plea followed by relative safety, or rendition to Uganda, where his safety and liberty would be under threat.”
Abrego was taken into immigration custody Monday morning. His lawyers filed a new lawsuit Monday to challenge his latest detention and potential deportation.
To borrow Bondi’s phrase, is this “what American justice looks like”? In response to the Saturday filing, the DOJ said in a statement that Abrego “can plead guilty and accept responsibility or stand trial before a jury.” Those are generally the options in criminal cases. But the government doesn’t seem eager to bring this one to a jury. Rather, it seems eager to spirit the defendant out of the country again, going so far as to hold the threat of a dangerous exile over his head as leverage to secure a conviction without having to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt at trial. I should note that in criminal cases across the country — ones you’ve never heard of and never will — prosecutors make plea offers that force defendants to make choices that would put them in bad situations immediately to avoid worse fates down the line. Against that backdrop, it’s unsurprising that most cases don’t go to trial. In the ones that do, defendants who are convicted face greater punishment than they would have faced had they pleaded guilty, a phenomenon that’s been called “the trial penalty.” So at least from the defense’s vantage point, there’s an element of legalized coercion baked into the system. In that light, it’s understandable that not everyone sees American justice as a righteous concept to begin with. But it can always be further degraded. The Trump administration seems hell-bent on such degradation. Having embarrassed itself with the illegal removal of Abrego and failure to quickly fix it, it’s now acting as a sort of dystopian travel agent in a desperate bid to avoid a criminal case that it didn’t have to bring in the first place. Rather than ensuring that Abrego would “face justice,” as Bondi proclaimed upon his U.S. return, the government appears to be trying to save face. No matter what happens next, that won’t be possible in the eyes of people who’ve been paying attention. The damage to American justice has been done. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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