Don’t Forget Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Dismissed Smuggling Case | Opinion
Following last week’s dismissal of the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, don’t make a hero out of him, but don’t forget him either. Abrego Garcia is like many of those who broke our laws to get into this country. He lived in the shadow of the American dream. He may even have tried to help others illegally enter the country. But he is important for reasons that have nothing to do with his relative merit as a human being.
Trump administration law breakers have been trying to break this law breaker ever since they first illegally deported him to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador—baselessly branding him a member of a drug gang. It’s these culprits we should worry about. They’re the greater threat to law and order.
Last year, after months of outright defiance and lies about how helpless they were to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump administration officials magically made Abrego Garcia reappear. And then they arrested him, vilifying him as an “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator”—a monster that federal law enforcement pledged would never be left to prowl our streets snarling at defenseless women and children.
Yet they didn’t have the guts—the evidence, that is—to charge Abrego Garcia with any of this. Instead, they only charged him with smuggling aliens—and not only did that charge not stick, last week the case was found to be totally bogus. A federal judge ruled that prosecutors persecuted Abrego Garcia not because he had committed a crime, but because he had the presumption to exercise his legal right to challenge his deportation.
Was Abrego Garcia guilty of smuggling illegal immigrants? Don’t bet on it. The case against him hinged on chicanery by federal prosecutors. Their star witness was a five-times deported and twice-convicted felon who admits smuggling aliens. They sprung him from jail after he agreed to testify against Abrego Garcia. His perhaps intentionally preposterous story about Abrego Garcia spending 120 hours a week driving hundreds of illegal aliens across the country would likely have been laughed out of court at trial. Did Abrego Garcia help other illegal aliens? We will never know, but that’s comparatively unimportant.
To President Donald Trump the guilt or innocence of his enemies doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are his enemies. He knows from a lifetime as the “lawfare” king that the legal battle is itself the punishment. Facing years of court battles can ruin anyone, including people who are entirely innocent.
And that’s why, in cases like this, the courts don’t do enough by dismissing bogus charges. The people who bring them must be punished—an example must be made. There are a couple of ways to do it.
The most effective penalty against government lawyers may be to go after the law licenses of those who have engineered sham prosecutions. The court in Abrego Garcia’s case has the power to punish the lawyers. The court found that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche openly declared that the prosecution was about Abrego Garcia’s court case against the United States, not his supposed smuggling of illegals. Blanche should be disciplined.
Lawsuits for money damages against the government are also important but less effective as a deterrent. U.S. taxpayers have to foot that bill, not the bad guys who broke the law. The bad guys will be long gone before our slow-moving courts hold the country accountable for their misdeeds.
But Abrego Garcia, and someday former FBI Director James Comey, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton and a host of other Trump victims, should be allowed to seek damages to compensate them for the suffering and expense they faced from abusive law enforcement. Money claims should even be allowed about prosecutors when they act as arms of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) instead of justice.
Ironically, Trump is presently running this compensation system in reverse, setting aside nearly $1.8 billion and allowing recovery by people actually convicted of crimes rather than those found innocent. Unless this sleazy slush fund is stopped, we will find ourselves facing another classic case of Trumpian projection. While actually weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies, he is claiming it was weaponized against him and his supporters—including the thugs who attacked the Capitol and injured some 140 police officers. Is there no end to the irony?
Thomas G. Moukawsher is a former Connecticut complex litigation judge and a former leader within the American Bar Association. He is the author of the book, The Common Flaw: Needless Complexity in the Courts and 50 Ways to Reduce It.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.
