CHRIS NEWMAN OF NDLON DISCUSSES WIDER CONTEXT ON KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA’S CASE

LOS ANGELES, April 28 – President Trump seemed to admit in an interview that he hasn’t lifted a finger to free Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the immigrant worker from Maryland who was falsely accused, illegally abducted and hidden away in an El Salvador prison. It’s a damning admission, if true. But is it true? With the President, you never know.

Chris Newman, the lawyer for Kilmar’s family (and NDLON’s legal director), spoke about this on Monday in a podcast interview with Greg Sargent of The New Republic. Besides the President’s opaque remarks, Chris also discussed El Salvador’s alarming descent into fascism.

The following are key excerpts from the interview:

GREG SARGENT: Time magazine asked Trump, Have you asked Bukele to return him? Trump admitted, I haven’t, and said his lawyers have not told him he has to.

CHRIS NEWMAN: … It seems to be an admission as well that he’s violating the Supreme Court order because the order clearly said that he was supposed to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. And the fact that he hasn’t tried seems to be a dead-to-rights admission that he is not complying with the order.

SARGENT: Time magazine … said, Well, OK, if you haven’t asked Bukele to return him, then aren’t you violating the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return? Trump stammered and said something like, Well, the lawyers aren’t telling me I have to do that. They don’t really want to do that at this juncture. That strikes me as pretty damning. Trump is admitting it’s an option, but he’s not taking it.

NEWMAN: Yeah, and it makes you wonder which lawyer, if any, he’s talking to. …Is he just making it entirely up and he hasn’t spoken to any lawyers at all? The fact is that we don’t know. …Trump is trying to make it seem like he ultimately is all three branches of government. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s spoken to lawyers or not. His administration must comply with the Supreme Court order.
NEWMAN: President Bukele, while autocratic, dictatorial—I think he refers to himself as the world’s coolest dictator—is quite popular in El Salvador because in the short term he has decreased street crime. But the way he’s done it has been by implementing something that he refers to as a “state of exception” … approximately 75,000 people have been arrested, imprisoned, put into these black sites where their family members don’t know where they are without any access to a trial, any counsel, any indicia of who their accusers are or what evidence is being used against them. Bukele’s popularity rose by politically demagoguing the exact same people that Donald Trump—quite literally, the exact same people, MS-13. So if you’re Donald Trump, you’re sitting here going like, Wow, I need to copy what that Salvadoran dictator is doing.

Here is audio of the podcast, The Daily Blast. The transcript is available here.