Trump Insists Union Apprentice Is a Terrorist With No Rights
About 100,000 people packed 5th Avenue last weekend to protest a Trump administration agenda that includes the kind of deportations that allowed union apprentice Kilmar Abrego to be shipped off to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. Photo/Joe Maniscalco
By Steve Wishnia
To the Trump regime, 29-year-old Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an “enemy alien.” In a brief filed with the Supreme Court April 7, Solicitor General D. John Sauer called him “a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization,” to wit, “a ranking member of the MS-13 gang.”
To the SMART union (Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, Transportation), he’s “Brother Kilmar,” a first-year apprentice sheet-metal worker with Local 100 in the Maryland-Washington-Virginia region.
Abrego Garcia “works full-time to support his wife and five-year-old son, who has autism and a hearing impairment,” SMART General President Michael Coleman said in a statement Apr. 1. “He came to the United States as a teenager 15 years ago, and it is my understanding that he was legally authorized to live and work in this country and had fully complied with his responsibilities under the law. He did not have a criminal record and is, in fact, an example of the hard work that SMART members pride themselves on.”
Abrego Garcia was seized March 12 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents who stopped his car after he had picked up his son on his way home from a job in Baltimore. Three days later, he was flown to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT (Terrorism Confinement Center) prison, on a plane that took off after a federal judge ordered Justice Department attorneys to stop it from leaving.
On Apr. 4, federal District Judge Paula Xinia ordered the government to return him to the United States by 11:59 p.m. the following Monday, Apr. 7. The federal Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rejected the government’s request to dismiss that deadline on Apr. 7.
“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,” it held.
But a few hours later, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay, leaving Abrego Garcia in CECOT.
Now, the union is in a “holding pattern” waiting for the Supreme Court to take further action, a SMART spokesperson told Work-Bites Apr. 9. It’s urging members to reach out to their Congressmembers to demand Abrego Garcia’s release, and it’s doing whatever it can to support his family.
Fleeing gang violence
Abrego Garcia told an immigration court in 2019 that he had emigrated to Maryland in 2011 after his family had spent years moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in San Salvador, trying to evade the Barrio 18 gang’s attempts to extort his mother’s homemade-pupusa business and threats to kill him and his older brother.
Around 2016, he met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen and mother of two children. They moved in together in 2018.
In March 2019, he and three other men were waiting for day-labor gigs in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Md., when they were arrested by Prince George’s County police. Abrego Garcia was turned over to ICE, which sought to deport him.
The evidence it cited was a county police “Gang Field Interview Sheet” that said he was suspected of being a gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls cap and a hoodie; and that a confidential informant had said he was an active member of MS-13’s “Westerns” clique.
Abrego Garcia was released from detention in October 2019, after a federal immigration judge ruled that he could not be deported to El Salvador, because it was likely he would face “persecution” by Barrio 18.
His current lawyers said in a brief that both the federal Justice Department and Suffolk County police in New York State told them that the Westerns operate in Brentwood, Long Island, 260 miles from Hyattsville.
‘Inhumane and squalid’
At the April 4 appeals-court hearing, Justice Department attorney Erez Reuveni said it was “not in dispute” that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported. He blamed “administrative error.”
Reuveni was suspended the next day for failing to “vigorously advocate.”
In an Apr. 8 filing, Sauer argued that the order to return Abrego Garcia was “district-court diplomacy” that required the U.S. “to successfully persuade or compel the Government of El Salvador to release a member of a designated foreign terrorist organization who is on foreign soil under foreign control.”
The Justice Department’s other arguments include that Abrego Garcia being a “terrorist” nullified the ruling that he couldn’t be sent back to El Salvador; that he has no right to claim “irreparable harm” for being separated from his family; and that he can’t claim that he might be tortured, because “both the United States and El Salvador are parties to the Convention Against Torture.”
Nonsense, Abrego-Garcia’s lawyers responded. He and the other deportees are being imprisoned in CECOT under a federal contract with the government of El Salvador, they noted.
“It was not impossible for the Government to effectuate Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador within 72 hours of his seizure by ICE,” they wrote Apr. 7. “And it is surely equally possible for the Government to fly the same planes in the opposite direction.”
The immigration judge who heard his case in 2019 “found him to be credible, and concluded that he was the victim of gang violence in El Salvador,” they added. “The Government’s contention that he has suddenly morphed into a dangerous threat to the republic is not credible.”
CECOT, opened in January 2023 and designated for hard-core gang members, has been described as one of the “the most inhumane and squalid” prisons in the world, the appeals court wrote. It averages three deaths a week from violence or lack of medical attention, and up to 150 prisoners are packed into cells with no mattresses and only two toilets, 23½ hours a day.
“Indeed, U.S. President Donald Trump has made comments to the press expressing glee and delight at the torture that the Government of El Salvador inflicts upon detainees in CECOT,” the judges noted.
‘Shuddering power’
There is a huge threat to civil liberties here, law professors Erwin Chermerinsky, Martha Minow, and Laurence Tribe argued in an amicus brief. “In this case, the Executive Branch is effectively asserting absolute, unreviewable authority to remove an individual from the United States, even where the removal was in conceded violation of a court order,” they wrote.
Abrego Garcia is among several union members ensnared in Trump’s deportation mania. On March 25, ICE agents grabbed Mexican-born Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a cofounder of the farmworkers union Familias Unidas por la Justicia, while he was driving his wife to work in Mount Vernon, Wash. They smashed his car window. On Feb. 28, SEIU Local 925 member Lewelyn Dixon, a lab technician at the University of Washington who has a green card, was detained at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport when she returned from a trip to the Philippines.
Two others were academics targeted for pro-Palestine political activity: Mahmoud Khalil, a United Auto Workers Local 2710 member who has a green card; and Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, an SEIU Local 509 member with a student visa who was snatched on the street by masked men. Her offense was an opinion article in a college newspaper.
“The labor movement must act to stop Trump's deportation, censorship, and intimidation machine,” a group of ten national unions and more than 20 locals said in a statement released Apr. 7.
In Abrego Garcia’s case, the SMART spokesperson says the union hopes the Supreme Court will rule in favor of “liberty and justice for all.”