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- [00:00]
A
Hey everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark, joined by Andrew Egger, Morning Shots co author, here to talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Big things happening today. You guys probably know the story of the case, but Andrew, this morning we woke up, there's some new news. This is kind of a moving target. So as we're speaking, which is like 10:15 this morning, tell us the latest.
- [00:23]
B
For the last while. Basically, since he came back to the U.S. kilmar Abrego Garcia has been in custody, not of immigration officials, but he's been under custody for the criminal charges that the White House has brought, the Justice Department has brought against him, supposedly for smuggling people, other undocumented immigrants from one point of the country to the other in 2022. That's why he's been in custody. Over the weekend he was released for the first time since he became sort of a household name. He was allowed to walk free for the duration of this weekend, released from a federal prison in Tennessee and was at home over the weekend. But this morning in Baltimore, he was required to report back into ICE custody in Baltimore and he was widely expected to be re detained. And that's what happened. He showed up at an ICE facility in Maryland and was taken back into custody. He and his wife walked in, only his wife walked out. And the Department of Homeland Security has immediately announced its plans to move forward with deporting him, not, not to El Salvador where he can't be deported, according to a former stay from a judge, and also not to anywhere nearby, but over to Uganda is what they have recently announced.
- [01:37]
A
Presumably he has tons of family members there and ties and all that.
- [01:42]
B
Yeah, yeah. Obviously not. And this is a thing that his lawyers have characterized and I think obviously accurately as just completely punitive. The Justice Department and DHS were putting forward a plea deal for Kilmer Abrego Garcia over the weekend where if he would agree to plead guilty to these federal charges that they have slapped on him in a sort of a face saving measure to try to make him look bad and make them look better for deporting him to El Salvador in the first place, if he would agree to plead guilty to that, he would serve some time in prison here and then he would have been deported to Costa Rica. Is what the, what the, what the deal on the table was. Instead, what appears to be the case is that he did not agree to take that, that plea. He has pled not guilty to those charges. He has tried to, he is, he is currently trying to Get a judge to throw them out as, as essentially being a targeted, unjust political prosecution. And so instead what they are now trying to do is, all right, you know, we tried to, we tried to be nice, we tried to give you a way out. And so instead of. And again, it's just amazing because this is immigration policy, not criminal enforcement, right? But what they're now trying to do is to deport him deliberately to a place where he has no connections in order to kind of hit him for not taking this plea.
- [02:59]
A
Let's just take a pause and just be candid about I think, what happened here, which is the government fucked up. They fucked up. And then they compounded their fuck up with a sort of regime of cruelty towards this one individual because they couldn't admit that they fucked up. The original fuck up was sending him to El Salvador, which they were not allowed to do. And when it was exposed, they sent him to El Salvador. They created a, you know, image of this man and some of it may be true, we don't know. This is why you adjudicate these things. But they created this image of this man who was a wife beater, who was a smuggler, who in their telling would go continuously from Maryland to Texas and back and forth over ungodly amount of hours smuggling illegal immigrants into the country who may have transported minors. I mean, they made all these allegations just because they fucked up. And then they detained him and they brought him back, even though they said they couldn't bring him back. And they put these charges against him. And now they're saying, well, you know what, we'll be nice to you and send you to Costa Rica if you admit to this, if you plead guilty to these charges, or we'll send you to Uganda. And like, that's not a real choice. They're basically just trying to compound their fuck up by being more cruel to the guy. And they think they're smart about it and you can jump in at any point here, but like, they think they're so smart about it because they think, oh, well, we get all these people defending this guy who's a bad guy, and you know, look at these libs who defend this guy. When in reality the defenses just do things properly, just go by the usual letter of the law, follow the proper procedures. If you end up deporting the guy through proper procedures, fine, but don't be an asshole about it. And that's essentially what they're doing here, is just compounding their fuck up by being an asshole. Sorry, I know if that's too silly and crude, but that's basically what it is.
- [04:52]
B
No, it's 100% what it is. And we should drill down specifically on this plea thing too, because this is, I mean, this is really kind of where it gets beyond the pale, if it wasn't already, because ordinarily, and look like plea agreements are already sort of overused around America. It's like a long time criminal justice thing that it's like it's too common for prosecutors to, to kind of threaten that they're going to soak a guy with all kinds of charges in order to get him to plead down to something, you know, smaller. It's, there are reasons why that happens. It's a, it's a bit of a thorny debate. But the whole thing there is that if you don't take the plea, then you're rolling the dice at trial. Right? Like, but before a jury or whatever, which is not at all what the, what the Justice Department is trying to say here. What they're trying to say here is take the plea, plead guilty to these criminal charges, or we're going to try really hard to short circuit your criminal trial to not let you go to trial at all instead to dump you across an ocean in Uganda.
- [05:48]
A
Now why would they not want to go to trial? Why would they not want that if they only have the goods in the, if they think they have the goods in this guy, right? They have the goods in this guy. They put together this comprehensive complaint against them. They say they have, you know, geo trackers having him in Texas and then dropping people off across the country illegally. If they have the goods, wouldn't they want to go to trial?
- [06:08]
B
And I don't want to like get this twisted because it is totally possible that there is some criminal behavior that they would be able to prove against Kilmer at Burgo. Garcia the problem for them is that the criminal behavior even that they themselves have alleged in the indictment is not even close to the stuff that they have gotten up at podiums at the White House. And what Pam Bondi has said outside of a courtroom about him in terms of just like him being like a high ranking MS.13 gang banger and throwing around the term human trafficking and all those sorts of things. If you actually sit down and read the indictment that they charge against him. Human trafficking is not the, is not the crime. It's not the alleged crime. Human trafficking is a terrible crime that involves taking people from one place to another against their will, which is not what Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been charged with Kilmar Abrego. Garcia has just been charged with basically taking people from point A to point B who are in the country illegally. Right. Like kind of helping move them to the interior of the country. The still a crime. If they can, if they can prove it in court, then then they ought to and it ought to be charged as such. But it's, but, but the thing, but the point I'm trying to make is that even that doesn't really get them where they want to get, which is this guy's like, like pure evil. And he ought to be like, that's my point, out of the mouth.
- [07:23]
A
They don't have the goods. That's my point. They don't have the goods. They just want to make an example of this guy and you know, maybe they'll end up making an example of him and they will get him to Uganda. I should note that his attorneys or his attorney has filed a legal action to block his immediate deportation. It's a habeas petition. It's with the judge who handled the earlier legal proceedings that involved him being sent to El Salvador. We'll see how it plays out. But he's got the full weight of the federal government going after him. This is. It's unlikely that he's going to end up in a good spot here.
- [07:59]
C
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- [09:25]
A
I wanted to note another story because obviously we're just sort of drowning in the cruelty of the immigration regime here, but this one really caught my mind. It's not Kamara Beggar Garcia, but to a degree it does illustrate just how much this dragnet has impacted people both here legally and illegally and for like real crimes and like totally petty crimes that are, you know, years old. So this story popped up. It's from MassLive.com I'm just going to read parts of it, but it involves a husband who watched his wife, this guy named Marcel Rosa, he watched his wife, Jimmy Jimenez Rosa being taken away. And this was at Boston Logan on August 11th. What happened was she was detained after they came back from Mexico. They had their three young daughters with them and Jimene Rosa is a legal permanent resident. She's actually a mother of four US Citizens. Her lawyers believe she was detained because of a decades old personal use marijuana charge which is no longer a crime in Massachusetts. So what happens is they get in, they detain the mother and the husband in front of the ICE agents or the agents, I should say says, I was just like, girls, we might never see your mother again in this country. I looked over to the officer and said, am I telling the truth? And he said, yeah, that could be possible. I told my kids right in front of the officer that she's being arrested and the girls just started crying, hugging her. The husband said, I know most parents would not have told that to their kids, but there was no way I was going to allow those officers to think they're just going to rip my wife away from my family, thinking it's going to be business as usual. The girls just clung to him and started crying and wife ended up being detained for 10 days. The family was thrust into what the paper says is a bureaucratic maze as the 42 year old mother was shuttled between detention facilities, including one for men only, from Massachusetts to Maine. She was denied proper health care for her diabetes, asthma and other serious health issues, which led to two hospitalizations. Her lawyers said all this happened while her husband, who was a former Department of Homeland Security employee who grew up in Boston, struggled to locate her and secure her release through court intervention. I'll just read how it ends up, because it's disturbing how it all ends up. She ends up being released. This is how the paper describes it. Jimenez Rosa's time in custody ended with her alone, wet and begging for help at a Cheesecake factory in the Burlington Mall after ICE agents released her into the rainy street outside the detention facility Wednesday night. She was 30 miles from home with no phone, in a broken spirit. The family fear is that their nightmare will never truly end. And I'm, like, speechless about it.
- [12:12]
B
Yeah, it's. What. What do you say about a story like that? I mean, it's in. In some respect, these are the good stories, I guess, because they have an ending. These are the ones where, like, a person gets swept up. Yeah, but no, like. Like, it's. It's. It's horrible. Like, it's horrifying in every respect. This person should never have been swept up in this. In this deportation dragnet. It shows, like, unbelievable failures in policy. It's unbelievably traumatic for the family. And. And the kicker is that, like, even though these are, like, quote, unquote, the better outcomes, these are, like, the only way. These stories where, like, the person where ICE realizes that they kind of made a mistake, and they put the person back, or close to back, 30 miles away at a fucking Cheesecake Factory, and they're able to kind of then come out and talk about what happened to them. I mean, anytime it's a citizen getting swept up in this dragnet or a legal permanent resident, I mean, the conditions they talk about are uniformly horrifying, like, nobody knows what's going on. It's totally slapdash. They're shuttled from facility to facility. They don't get to talk to their lawyer. They don't get the treatment they need. I mean, this is. This is in every story. And it's. It's not like the. The. The people who shouldn't be getting swept up in this are getting treated worse. This is just. These are the only glimpses we get into this totally chaotic, totally inhumane, totally barbaric system that is handling thousands and thousands of new people who get swept up into it every single day in this country, most of whom are either just detained indefinitely at this point or are getting deported and so aren't able to tell these stories. But it's. I mean, the scale of the brutality here is something that I think we still haven't really gotten our heads around. And the only way, I mean, the only way to do it is to continue to focus on these individual stories and the individual human harms. But it is grotesque. I mean, it's really, really bad out there.
- [14:08]
A
Yeah. I had someone ask me who is like in this field of advocacy being like, what do we do about this stuff? And honestly the only answer I had to this person was, you just gotta keep documenting that it's happening. Right. In this case, this woman, just to be clear, was a 20 year old college student when she was arrested for having possessing a small amount of marijuana. She actually pleaded guilty and fully served probation for it. This was 2003, so 22 years ago. The only thing I would just say is, yes, fair enough. This is the good ending in that she was returned 10 days after going through whatever hell she had to go through, dropped off at a cheesecake factory in the rain. What the fuck? But like, her kids witnessed all this in real time. The mom being pulled away and detained at an airport and sent away and the father being like, you may never see your mother again. And he was being honest with him. And that doesn't just end there. I mean, there's some lingering trauma that comes with something like that. And so even in these good stories, the story doesn't end there. This is, this is going to impact the kids forever. This is going to impact this family forever. She will never, I imagine, travel internationally again. She might never. You know, I have no idea what they're going to think, but she's certainly going to have to think about her future here with her family, with this hanging over her head, this awful. And this is what we're doing. What is the, what's the upside? What's the upshot for this? Like, is she, is she a threat? She's here legally. Is she a threat? Like, what are we doing?
- [15:38]
B
Yeah, yeah, I feel like we glossed over the fact that the, the precipitating cause of all of this was the fact that several decades ago while she was in college, she was arrested for a minor marijuana possession.
- [15:49]
A
So they're clearly going through all these old reports looking for any infraction for any green card holder or anything like that. So it's, it's a dark time, clearly.
- [15:58]
B
Can we talk just real briefly again about the reaction of the dad that you mentioned there? Because I definitely could imagine a person being like, well, you know, play it cool for the sake of your kids, you know, like, don't let it, you know, don't make this big scene now. But also at the same time, like Plainly this was like a person who has been following these stories, who has like, just seen the way that people are just getting vacuumed up. And like, in a way, I mean, and this is another just kind of really grotesque feature of a lot of these stories that you read where, like, at the point of arrest, at the point of detention, the people are kind of. Are still kind of feeling like, is there some mistake here? Like, what's. Surely, surely these people are not blowing up my life right now because of this nonsense that happened, you know, two decades ago or whatever. Like, like, surely there's been some mistake. Surely there's going to be some sort of, like, somebody higher up will realize that something has gone wrong and it will be attended to. And like, in a lot of these stories, it doesn't. It doesn't get attended to. It's just their lives are just ruined, like, forever. And so, like, you can, you can put yourselves in the shoes of that guy, be like, fuck, no. You're not going to take my wife here without us, like, making you feel what you're doing to us like you agents of the state right now. And I totally get that. I mean, I'm totally. It's just horrible.
- [17:16]
A
It does affect you because you see all these videos that people are shooting, including in D.C. actually, where people are being detained. And the only recourse they have in that moment is to plead to the humanity of the agent who is arresting them or detaining them, and to say, there's one viral video that was going around in D.C. where this guy was like, my wife just gave birth. Like, literally, she cannot walk, she cannot move. I need to get to her. And he was detained. And all the people in D.C. right now who are chanting against these Guardsmen and ICE agents and FBI officials being like, do you have no humanity? Like, don't you understand what you're doing? Like, think about what legacy you're leaving. Like, it's just them pleading with these people to say, be a better person. And in this case, the same thing. A father who made the decision. I don't know how the fuck I would react in that moment, who made the decision to plead with this agent saying, tell my kids to their face that they may never see their mother again in the United States. And the agent apparently saying, yeah, that's true, you might not. And then proceeding with it anyway. So. Well, this has been uplifting. Really good start to the day. Andrew, thank you so much. I appreciate it. No, I really do appreciate that you're still on the story. So thank you.
- [18:28]
B
Can I. Can I circle around, just say one other thing about Garcia here at the end. Well, just. Just because I think just to put a kind of a bow on it because, like, just going by, like, him playing the percentages in his own case, like, I don't know, I might have taken the deal to go to Costa Rica and just, like, say, said what the government wanted me to say. And like, you know, it's hard to put yourself in that shoes and turn that down when the alternative is so horrific. And like, like you said, like, we don't know to what extent he's like, a great guy, to what extent he may have done various unsavory things, like, in his life, but, like, I think it is, like, actually basically heroic to, like, to refuse to go along with this whole thing for all the reasons we've been talking about and refuse to, like, make yourself a mouthpiece for the, for the government and get yourself a slightly better deal here because, like, the whole thing is so unbelievably grotesque. And the fact that he is actually fighting it to the extent that he can, I think, is. Is really laudable.
- [19:23]
A
We'll see how it ends up. Good bow. Thank you for putting the bow on that, Andrew Egger. Appreciate you, man. Talk to you later. For everyone who watch this. Appreciate you guys watching this. Subscribe to the feed so you can get more content and conversations like this. We'll talk to you soon.