Building Trades to Trump: Bring Kilmar Home!
First year SMART apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia was seized by ICE on March 12 in Maryland and shipped to a notorious black hole prison in El Salvador.
By Steve Wishnia
With the Trump regime’s minions defying court orders to turn over information about deported Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts, labor unions are calling on the government to “bring him home.”
“Since last week, our demand has been a simple one — one that echoed the calls of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s family, community and allies: Bring Kilmar home and give him the due process that is his right,” SMART General President Michael Coleman said in a statement Apr. 11. “It’s been weeks since Kilmar, a sheet-metal apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream, was mistakenly deported.”
“We demand @smartunionworksapprentice Kilmar Armando Abrego-Garcia be returned to his family. Bring him home now,” North America’s Building Trades Unions posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Apr. 9. “Bring him home!” the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades chimed in on Apr. 10.
“The Supreme Courtruled that the Trump administration must facilitate the return of our @smartunionworksunion brother Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the AFL-CIO said Apr. 11, urging members to “write your member of Congress and demand that he is returned to his family.
Abrego Garcia, 29, was seized Mar. 12 in Maryland, despite an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling that he could not be sent back to El Salvador because gangs there had threatened to kill him and his brother. On Mar. 15, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] defied a court order and flew him and about 260 others, mostly Venezuelans, to El Salvador’s proudly brutal Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) black-hole prison. It deemed them all “gang members” and therefore “enemy aliens.”
He is not believed to have had any contact with his family or lawyers in the four weeks since then, a SMART Local 100 spokesperson told Work-Bites.
Aerial view of the Center for Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) in El Salvadore.
Federal District Judge Paula Xinis issued an order Apr. 4 that the government must “facilitate” and “effectuate” bringing Abrego Garcia back home by Apr. 7. On Apr. 10, after Chief Justice John Roberts had stayed that order, the Supreme Court upheld the “facilitate” part of it. It instructed Judge Xinis to clarify what she meant by “effectuate,” with “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” It said the government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” to bring him back.
‘They’ve done nothing’
But at a hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Md. Apr. 11, Drew C. Ensign, a deputy assistant attorney general for immigration, refused to do that. He told the court that the government was “not yet prepared to share” any information.
“Where is he and under whose authority?” Judge Xinis asked. “The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: Where is he?”
Ensign answered that the government doesn’t have evidence to contradict the belief that Abrego Garcia is still in El Salvador.
Asked about what it had done to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, Ensign said he didn’t have personal knowledge about that.
“So that means they’ve done nothing,” the judge responded.
Judge Xinis ordered the defendants to submit daily reports, beginning April 12, from “an individual with personal knowledge” about where Abrego Garcia is, what they’ve done to facilitate his return, and what steps they will take next.
“The judge made clear that she’s not going to allow the government to keep playing games,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, said in a statement after the hearing. “They need to bring Kilmar back to the United States, and they need to give meaningful substantive updates as to their progress in accomplishing that.”
That, however, is what the Justice Department is refusing to do. It has insisted that the district court has no power to order Abrego Garcia returned, because he “is in the custody of a foreign sovereign.” In a response to Judge Xinis before the hearing, Ensign and three other attorneys wrote that they “are not in a position where they ‘can’ share any information requested by the Court,” because the judge had not yet clarified what “effectuate” meant, and “foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines.”
The U.S. government is paying $6 million to the government of El Salvador to house deported immigrants at CECOT. The Department of Homeland Security hired the GlobalX charter airline to fly them there, and arranged a prison tour and photo opportunity for Secretary Kristi Noem. A CBS News investigation aired Apr. 6 which obtained internal government documents listing the names “and any known criminal information” for the 238 Venezuelans sent to the prison as “gang members” said it was unable to find any criminal records in the U.S. for 179 of them.
Secretary Noem told Axios Apr. 9 that “they should stay there for the rest of their lives.”
“If this can happen to Garcia, it can happen to anyone,” SMART’s Transportation Division said in a statement Apr. 10. “The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”