Kilmar Abrego Garcia Returned to US

by Zachary Miller

On June 6th, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian immigrant who was illegally deported in March of this year, appeared in a Tennessee courtroom, signaling his return to the US. Garcia’s return itself marks a victory for the mass movement in the US, which has fought vigorously to defend the lives and rights of immigrants being terrorized by ICE and the ultra-reactionary Trump administration across the country.

In turn, the Trump administration is attempting to save face for it’s self-admitted mistake of deporting Garcia in the first place, and the subsequent fallout it caused after refusing to have Garcia returned to the US, deepening the political crisis of the bourgeois state. Still clinging to the claim that Garcia is somehow affiliated with gangs or other criminal enterprises, the justice department has indicted Garcia on absurd charges of being part of a decades-long human trafficking conspiracy that involves transporting “thousands” of undocumented workers. They insist this is why he is being returned to the US. The maximum sentence for every migrant he allegedly transported is ten years, putting Garcia’s maximum potential sentence well beyond the scope of the man’s lifespan. The shoddy evidence Trump’s justice department is drudging up is cobbled together from interactions Garcia has had with police over the years, none of which were met with criminal charges, and other unsubstantiated claims.

The deportation of Garcia, a 29-year-old sheet metal worker, husband, and father living in Maryland with protected legal status, represented one of the most flagrant and farcical cases of white terror unleashed by the Trump administration to date. Garcia was imprisoned for over two months in CECOT, a concentration camp-like prison in El Salvador, built by current president Nayib Bukele, an ultra-reactionary stooge of Donald Trump. Bukele was complicit in Trump’s plans to keep Garcia in El Salvador. In a statement to monopoly press ABC News, Garcia’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg stated: “From the beginning, this case has made one thing painfully clear: The government had the power to bring him back at any time. Instead, they chose to play games with the court and with a man’s life.”

The Trump administration continues to use terror and deportation as a political and economic tool by utilizing immigrant and migrant workers—the most exploited sections of the US working class—as a scapegoat to provide cover to the ever-worsening economic crisis. These maneuvers serve two purposes: on one hand, they further repress and terrorize the already oppressed immigrant workers to keep them from fighting for their democratic rights and economic struggles, using deportations to make their conditions more precarious and to carry out mass layoffs. On the other, they sow division among the whole working class and pit worker against worker to compete for dwindling jobs and worsening pay.

These actions have not, and will not, bear the fruit the Trump administration and the imperialists hope to reap. The masses in the US have become more combative in confronting ICE terror, refusing to keep their heads down in the face of repression and reactionary violence, and increasingly refuse to be divided. In Garcia’s case, the trade union he belongs to, SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, has been demanding his return. As Garcia’s case goes to trial, the masses will keep fighting for his release and freedom.

Photo: SMART union members march in Detroit, MI demanding Garcia be returned home. Photo retrieved from SMART.

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