Kilmar Arbrego Garcia came to the United States in 2011. He lived in Maryland with his wife and 5-year-old child, who is autistic and intellectually disabled. He worked a full-time job and was a legal resident of the United States, and thanks to a 2019 court order, he could not be sent back to El Salvador, his country of origin.
Garcia was also recently apprehended by the Trump administration and put on a plane to El Salvador — without due process — to be held behind bars. This week, in a court filing, administration officials conceded that his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.”
It was against this backdrop that JD Vance decided to add some related thoughts to the public conversation, which did not go especially well for the vice president. NBC News reported:
Vice President JD Vance weighed into the case and falsely said on X Tuesday that Garcia was a “convicted MS-13 gang member.” Garcia has no criminal convictions in the U.S. or in El Salvador, his legal team said in the lawsuit. In a follow-up post on X Tuesday, Vance stood by his comments and called Garcia “an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country,” despite the 2019 protection order against his removal from the U.S.
Even for a vice president who routinely struggles with factual details, this was a mess.
Initially, the Ohio Republican, by way of social media, took aim at a journalist who’d fact-checked him and said that Garcia was a “convicted” gang member, which wasn’t true and which was not supported by the administration’s own court filing.
Vance then tried again in a follow-up tweet, claiming that a journalist had been “apparently unable or unwilling to look at the facts here.” The vice president not only doubled down on his dubious claim for which there does not appear to be any evidence, he also suggested the Biden administration was in office in 2019. Usually, when Republicans get this wrong, they claim that Joe Biden was in the White House in 2020, despite the fact that the Democrat was inaugurated in January 2021. Vance flubbed this even more dramatically, however, suggesting that Biden was president in the third year of Trump’s first term. As for Garcia, he remains in El Salvador, though his case is scheduled to be heard this week by a judge in Maryland. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
Latest Post
Recommended
