Developments In The Abrego Garcia Case And Clearing Up Some Social Media Nonsense About Guatemala

Just accept that the story about the family's pupuseria business was an invented fairy tale and the situation is a lot less complicated.

There are several legal stories bouncing around social media over the past few days but I want to return to Kilmar Abrego Garcia because there have been some interesting developments in the past 48 hours.

In addition to actual developments there is an implausible story that misreads a mistake into being reality, and makes the case Abrego Garcia’s Immigration Judge barred him from being removed to Guatemala — not El Salvador — and as a result sending him to El Salvador on March 15 was not any kind of error at all.

Back on April 14 I put up a long post on X where I suggested it was likely that Abrego Garcia was not removed to El Salvador as part of the deal with that country to temporarily house members of Tren de Aragua from Venezuela and MS-13 from El Salvador. It made no sense to me that we would be paying El Salvador to house a Salvadoran citizen that it would certainly take back as a regular deportee since the relationship between the two countries was friendly.

The district judge in Maryland assigned to the case filed by the family granted the family’s request for expedited discovery because she did not believe the status reports from the Administration about efforts to get Abrego Garcia back to the US were providing substantive information. Earlier this week the Plaintiffs sent a letter to the Judge asking for a status hearing to discuss the discovery responses by the Administration as part of that discovery, and attached the them to the letter.

In response to Interrogatory No. 11, the Administration answered as follows:

I win again.