Render Unto Caesar, Deport Unto CECOT
When a government can ignore its own courts, vanish a man it once protected, and silence the witness before the crime is named—what, precisely, remains of the republic?
What does it say about a government when it willfully defies its own Supreme Court to keep an innocent man imprisoned abroad?
It says the mask has slipped.
On March 15, 2025, Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Salvadoran national lawfully residing in Maryland with his U.S. citizen wife and children—was seized without cause, hurled through the machinery of immigration enforcement, and illegally deported to El Salvador. This, despite a standing federal court order granting him “withholding of removal” status, issued in 2019 after credible threats from Salvadoran gangs made his deportation unlawful.
The Trump administration later characterized this act—this unlawful expulsion in direct defiance of a federal ruling—as an “administrative error.” A phrase that now joins the bloodless lexicon of state cruelty, alongside “enhanced interrogation” and “collateral damage.” It wasn’t an error. It was an abduction by a government that no longer recognizes legal limits.
Once exiled, Abrego Garcia was delivered into the maw of CECOT, El Salvador’s most notorious prison complex—a brutalist monument to mass incarceration where transparency goes to die. There, he has remained without charge, trial, or visit, up until yesterday when Senator Chris Van Hollen met with him.
When the matter reached the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court—which, in this era of scorched-earth jurisprudence, can barely agree on the color of the sky—spoke with one voice. All nine justices united to say, in effect: “Return the man you illegally exiled.” And the Trump administration, in a display of imperial insolence, replied with silence. One imagines them filing the decision alongside their copies of the Constitution: unread and unopened.
In a press briefing as bloodless as the policy it defended, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to split the difference between obedience and defiance. “The Supreme Court made their ruling last night very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return,” she told reporters. One could almost hear the ghost of Pontius Pilate washing his hands in the West Wing. Facilitate, not effectuate. Assist, not act. It is the language of plausible deniability—of a government that pretends to obey while ensuring nothing happens at all.
Federal Judge Paula Xinis, overseeing compliance, has accused the administration of doing “nothing.” She has mandated daily progress updates, as if babysitting a willfully negligent defendant. At this rate, he might arrive sometime between the Rapture and the release of Trump’s tax returns.
And so we arrive at the only question that matters:
Why is the Trump administration actively defying the Supreme Court to prevent an innocent man from coming home?
Many rightfully feared that Garcia was dead and that was why the Trump administration was so willing to defy a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling, but Sen. Van Hollen proved what serving your constituents really looks like and assuaged those fears with his visit. The only reasonable explanation for Garcia’s continued exile is fear—not for national security, but for public disclosure.
Because if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is returned and permitted to speak, he will become more than a legal case. He will become a witness.
A man who was kidnapped by his government. Denied legal counsel. Locked in cages. Thrust into a foreign prison with no justification. And survived.
He could name the ICE officers who falsified documents. He could identify the officials who ignored judicial orders. He could describe, in fluent and terrifying detail, the interior of CECOT—the filth, the abuse, the silence. And in doing so, he would destroy the illusion that this was merely a bureaucratic mishap.
This, above all, is what authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate: not opposition, but memory. The threat is not dissent. It is recollection.
They do not fear Kilmar Abrego Garcia because of what he’s done. They fear him because of what he’s seen. Because in a government of spectacle and spin, the one thing more dangerous than a critic is a witness.
And so we return to the core truth: this is not about immigration. It is not about enforcement. It is not even about Garcia himself.
This is about power—unchecked, unbound, and now visibly unaccountable.
The Trump administration is defying the Supreme Court not because it can’t comply—but because it no longer believes it has to. It is testing the limits of its own impunity. And if this act goes unanswered, there will be no limits left to test.
The same men who demand border walls and chant about law and order are now hiding from a man they illegally deported, hoping the public will forget or the court will blink. For them, law is not a principle. It is a prop.
A government that can vanish a man protected by its laws, ignore a Supreme Court ruling, and carry on unpunished is not a democracy in crisis. It is a democracy in name only.
This is not a failure of logistics. This is the quiet birth of impunity.
This is so Frightening and so upsetting. My heart is broken for him and his family.