By Robert Dean
For Carter County Times
Before you read this, let’s take our political opinions and set them aside. Go put them in that kitchen drawer—you know the one. The one with the scissors, rubber bands, a couple of AA batteries, and your kid’s baseball cards from three years ago when he played third base for one season and was absolutely awful. (We won’t tell anyone.) I’ll wait.
Now that we’re all friends again, let’s talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Garcia is a Salvadoran national who’s lived in Maryland since 2019. He came through the front door with paperwork, followed the rules, and earned a court-issued “withholding of removal” status—basically a legal shield from deportation—because gangs back home threatened his life. He has never been charged or convicted of any crime in the U.S. or El Salvador. Cops in Maryland once stopped him because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hoodie and a hat—someone said he looked like a gang member. But there was nothing to charge him with, and no court ever found him guilty of anything.
And yet in March 2025, ICE mistakenly deported him anyway. They called it an “administrative error.”
Let’s pause on that: a man who followed every rule is now locked up in a foreign country, because of a paperwork glitch.
Garcia now sits in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a prison described by former U.N. anti-torture official Miguel Sarre as a “concrete and steel pit” used to “dispose of people without formally applying the death penalty.” He’s not being held for a crime. He’s being held because we sent him there and won’t go get him.
The Supreme Court—unanimously—ruled that the U.S. must facilitate his return. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, “The Government’s argument… implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene. That view refutes itself.”
And yet, Garcia is still there. Why?
Trump, whose administration deported him, says, “If the Supreme Court said bring somebody back, I would do that. I respect the Supreme Court.” But nothing’s happening. His team claims their hands are tied—that they can’t force El Salvador to release him. That it’s a foreign policy issue. That they’ve done what they can.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is playing the same game. He said, “How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? Of course, I’m not going to do it.” Then he doubled down: “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
Really? Two presidents. Two allied nations. One man wrongly imprisoned. And no one can pick up the phone and make this right?
This is more than incompetence, it’s a cover-up. There are two possible reasons Kilmar Abrego Garcia hasn’t been brought home:
- He’d tell the world how inhumane that prison really is.
- He’s already dead.
For my dollar, it’s probably the latter.
If they can do this to someone who followed every rule, what’s stopping them from doing it to you? What if you’re a natural-born citizen and someone in power decides you’re a problem? The government has already argued—out loud—that it can disappear people if it moves fast enough. That’s not how democracy works. That’s how authoritarian regimes function.
We have three branches of government. The president is not a king. The law is the law. The Supreme Court said bring him home. So, bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home. If he tells the truth about that prison, so be it. That truth might be uncomfortable. It might be shameful. But covering it up is worse.
This isn’t even mafia tactics. This is corruption in plain sight.
Contact us at news@cartercountytimes.com
