THE RETURN OF KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA ISN'T THE BIG WIN IT APPEARS TO BE

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is headed back to the U.S., and The New Republic's headline reads:

Trump Brings Kilmar Abrego-Garcia Back, Completely Caving

That's wrong. If Trump were completely caving, he'd be returning every renditioned immigrant imprisoned in El Salvador and other countries without due process. Instead, the message of this is: Okay, you sick liberal freaks, you wanted this one depraved gangbanger brought back to America to face charges? Well, just to get you to stop whining, we brought him back -- and boy, do we have charges for him to face.

The charges:

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi ... told reporters that a federal grand jury indicted Abrego Garcia on May 21 in Tennessee over allegations he conspired to transport thousands of migrants without legal status from Texas across the U.S. between 2016-2025. The two-count indictment accuses Abrego Garcia "of conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain" and "unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain." ...

The 10-page criminal indictment unsealed today alleges that Abrego Garcia is "a member and associate of the transnational criminal organization, La Mara Salvatrucha, otherwise known... as MS-13." The indictment also details that he participated in more than 100 trips smuggling individuals from Texas to Maryland, including unaccompanied minors and alleged members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13.

The government is claiming that Abrego Garcia transported thousands of migrants? We previously knew that there was one incident that appeared suspicious. As The New York Times reported early last month,

According to records released last month by the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Abrego Garcia notified immigration officials in late October 2022 that he wanted to move to Houston to be closer to his parents. Just five weeks later, he was driving back to Maryland — with eight passengers — when a highway patrol officer in Tennessee pulled him over for speeding.

In Homeland Security’s version of the trooper’s account, Mr. Abrego Garcia explained that he had left Houston three days earlier and was transporting people in his boss’s car to work in construction in Maryland. But there was no luggage, and the passengers all gave Mr. Abrego Garcia’s home address as their own — leading one officer to suspect the possibility of human trafficking.

In the end, Mr. Abrego Garcia was let off with a warning citation for driving with an expired license.

The indictment says that Abrego Garcia transported immigrants, and sometimes guns, or a regular basis. Why didn't we know about this before? The Times now tells us,

Two people familiar with the investigation said it made a significant leap forward when an imprisoned man recently came forward offering information about Mr. Abrego Garcia....

Does anyone else find this suspicious? A prisoner steps forward, and suddenly there's evidence that Abrego Garcia is a professional trafficker working with six co-conspirators, according to the indictment. Who is this prisoner, and what, if anything, did the prisoner get in return for making these accusations? The Times notes:

... there was concern and disagreement among prosecutors about how to proceed. In recent weeks, a supervisor in the federal prosecutor’s office in Nashville resigned over how the case was handled, these people said.

ABC concurs:

The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader's decision told ABC News. Schrader's resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.

This reminds me of the Bush administration's pursuit of the so-called War on Terror. Recall that false accounts from informants like the pseudonymous "Curveball" were used as evidence that Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of massive destruction; later, when Americans were torturing prisoners of war, the result was misinformation rather than usable intelligence:

A seasoned counterterrorism agent reportedly told Vanity Fair that following false leads generated through torture has caused waste and exhaustion and consumed "[a]t least 30 percent of the F.B.I.'s time, maybe 50 percent, in counterterrorism." According to another former intelligence official "[w]e spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms" because of the CIA's insistence that coercive interrogation techniques be used against Abu Zubaydah.

But Bush got himself reelected in 2004, and while he left office a pariah in 2009, anger about the torture program was limited to non-Republicans apart from John McCain, and it's never been politically possible to empty the prison at Guantanamo. That's why I'm skeptical that this will blow up in Trump and Bondi's faces.

I assume that Abrego Garcia's traffic stop will be sufficient to lead to a conviction at least on one charge, and the administration will blame Democratic messaging if the other charges don't stick (assuming they aren't quietly dropped between now and the trial). The return of Abrego Garcia will be sold as an act of extraordinary magnanimity, and our side will be partly to blame for that -- we haven't vividly made the case that every removed person deserves due process, that it's reasonable to demand due process for all of them, and that the allegations against other renditioned immigrants are as flimsy as those against Abrego Garcia, or even flimsier. Regrettably, there's been only one Chris Van Hollen, a senator persistent enough to get a meeting with Abrego Garcia. We needed more meetings and more efforts to humanize the disappeared. To the average American, it will appear as if the Trump administration gave critics everything they asked for. Congressional critics should have pushed harder and demanded more.