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For a while, the favored moniker for Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the media was “Maryland father.”
Abrego Garcia was indeed living in Maryland and was indeed a father, but this wasn’t what was most distinctive thing about him. There are hundreds of thousands of fathers living in the state who aren’t illegal immigrants and don’t have ties to criminal gangs.
Abrego Garcia, of course, is the man who was mistakenly deported to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador despite a judge’s order that he couldn’t be deported there.
Instead of quickly asking for Abrego Garcia to be sent back to the United States, the Trump administration dug in its heels and suffered repeated legal setbacks, including at the Supreme Court.
Sensing political opportunity and appalled at the notion of someone living in the US being sent, based on no criminal charges, to perhaps the most inhumane prison in the Western Hemisphere, Democrats made Abrego Garcia a cause.
They inevitably downplayed the drip-drip evidence that he was an unsympathetic character.
It emerged that he had been picked up by local police in 2019 at a Home Depot years ago and the cops suspected that he and his associates were gang members.
It emerged that his wife accused him of abusing her.
It emerged that he’d been stopped in Tennessee in suspicious circumstances in 2022 with multiple men in the vehicle.
Whether Abrego Garcia was a good guy or a reprobate, a member of MS-13 or of his church choir, had no bearing on whether he should have been imprisoned in El Salvador with our active support.
The answer to that was “no” regardless, but now that the Trump administration has brought him back to the United States and filed charges against him, the “Maryland father” description has been exposed as ludicrously inapt.
According to a Department of Justice indictment, Abrego Garcia routinely engaged in human smuggling, transporting illegal aliens within the United States on more than 100 occasions.
The facts set out in the indictment regarding the Tennessee traffic stop are particularly damning.
Abrego Garcia’s story was that the men in his Suburban had been working construction in St. Louis for two weeks and he was bringing them back to Maryland.
The men, all lacking identification, had no luggage or construction tools. The vehicle was outfitted with a makeshift third row for passengers in the back.
All of which was suspicious enough. What’s more, the indictment says, license-plate tracking data showed that the car hadn’t been anywhere close to St. Louis in the past year.
It had, however, been in the Houston, Texas, area, where the prosecutors say the illegal-alien passengers had been picked up.
The administration will have to prove its charges in court, and if they have been exaggerated in the cause of nailing Abrego Garcia, that will presumably be exposed.
The facts matter, and Abrego Garcia never should have been made into a mere symbol.
The administration seemed to think keeping him in El Salvador somehow furthered the cause of immigration enforcement, but whether Abrego Garcia stayed there or came back to the United States wasn’t going to materially affect deportation efforts one way or the other.
For their part, Trump’s critics — yet again — assumed because someone was targeted by the president, he or she must be a figure of righteousness.
The fact of the matter is that Abrego Garcia never should have been in the United States in the first place. He came here illegally in 2012.
Only after he was picked up by police in the aforementioned 2019 stop and put in deportation proceedings did he make a meritless asylum claim.
An immigration judge nevertheless granted him a withholding of removal and Abrego Garcia was permitted to go about his business, which, according to the Justice Department, was smuggling other illegal immigrants.
We’ll learn more as the case proceeds, but we know enough already to conclude that this isn’t a typical or commendable Marylander.
Twitter: @RichLowry