For Immediate Release // Please Excuse Cross Posting
Friday, July 11th, 2025
Contact: Palmira Figueroa, 425-301-2764; pfigueroa@ndlon.org
LOS ANGELES, July 10 — Newly revealed emails from a Justice Department whistleblower have blown apart the Trump Administration’s ludicrous claim that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a leader of a violent Salvadoran gang. An exchange between the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, released to Congress by Erez Reuveni, a 15-year veteran of the Justice Department, show that DHS officials went looking for evidence of Kilmar’s gang status and never found it – but repeated the slanderous claim anyway.
The following is a statement from Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON):
“The evidence of lawlessness and moral rot keeps piling up: This Administration is shot through with malice and incompetence. The Homeland Security Department sent Kilmar to serve a life sentence in CECOT, a Salvadoran megaprison, without evidence, charge, trial or conviction. When their mistake was exposed, they tried to retroactively justify their action by calling Kilmar first a gang member, then a gang leader, as well as a human trafficker and domestic abuser.
“The New Republic has been closely following this tragic story. As it explains in its latest dispatch, Reuveni asked officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement whether Kilmar could accurately be called a leader of MS-13. An unnamed ICE official responded: ‘I have not found anything indicating “leader,” but I’ll keep looking.’
“They didn’t find anything because there was nothing to find. Kilmar is a union member, not a gang member. He is a husband, father and worker. He is a victim of brutal acts committed by the U.S. Government and the dictatorial regime of President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Like many thousands of other immigrants all over the country, Kilmar had the extreme bad luck of being caught up in the Trump regime’s mad, lawless, indiscriminate assault on immigrants.
“Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller and the immigration capo Tom Homan and others across the Administration have compounded the crimes of lawless abuction and imprisonment with slander and character assassination.
“As Greg Sargent of The New Republic aptly put it: ‘This case stinks from top to bottom.’
“The good news is that the American people are awakening to the crimes being committed in their name, against their interests and with their tax dollars. This will stop when the people make it stop. As day laborers often say, ‘Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.’ Only the people save the people.”
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