On the way home, an unmarked vehicle pulled Abrego Garcia over. According to court documents, men identifying themselves as ICE agents with Homeland Security Investigations told him his "status has changed." Within minutes and without a warrant, he was handcuffed and detained in one of several ICE vehicles on the scene. The agents gave him 10 minutes to call his wife to collect the mute and terrified little boy watching everything from the backseat. Otherwise, they told him, his son would be handed over to Child Protective Services. She arrived to find her husband distraught and in tears. With no explanation for why or where he'd be taken, Abrego Garcia was promptly hauled away.
Shuttled between detention centers from Maryland, to Louisiana to Texas, Abrego Garcia managed only a few disoriented calls to his wife, his confusion palpable. He was being accused of gang affiliations. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife pleaded with ICE, explaining that he had fled gang threats as a teenager, earned U.S. protection and had already disproven baseless accusations of ties to MS-13, the notorious Salvadoran gang. According to court filings, ICE repeatedly assured him he'd get his day in court.
Then, from a detention center in La Villa, Texas, came Abrego Garcia's final, urgent call. He was being sent to El Salvador, to "CECOT," he told his wife. The next day, a news photo showed men kneeling, heads shaved, arms locked overhead - faces hidden. But she recognized those scars, those tattoos. There was her husband. Exiled to a hellish megaprison for terrorists, shoulder-to-shoulder with the " worst of the worst " in the country he'd worked so hard to escape.
Three days after Abrego Garcia's arrest, the federal government admitted that he had been imprisoned by mistake. It was "an administrative error," an ICE official conceded, relying on the type of bloodless phrase perennially favored by faceless, "bootlick bureaucrats," to borrow Timothy Synder's description in his book "On Freedom."
Too bad about that administrative error. In a cruel twist, attorneys for the government told Abrego Garcia's wife and her own attorneys there's nothing they can do to free him, now that he's in Salvadoran custody. Trump's "primacy in foreign affairs" - whatever that means - is more important than Abrego Garcia's family or his freedom, Trump's attorneys argued. If the government - our government - prevails, the man could be in the Salvadoran hellhole for the rest of his life.