NDLON CONDEMNS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S ‘MISTAKEN’ KIDNAPPING AND IMPRISONMENT OF FALSELY ACCUSED IMMIGRANT LABORER

LOS ANGELES, April 2 – The Trump Administration has admitted in a sworn statement that it sent a Salvadoran immigrant and former day laborer, Kilmer Armado Abrego-Garcia, to El Salvador’s mega prison by mistake.

Abrego-Garcia was falsely accused of belonging to the MS-13 gang. He denied it and there was no evidence against him. At no point in the long and disgraceful treatment of this innocent worker, husband and father has any agency – the Hyattsville City Police, Prince George’s County Police, ICE – shown any evidence proving why Abrego-Garcia should be locked up. At no point was he ever “convicted” – no matter what lies Vice President J.D. Vance tells on Twitter.

The current Administration has never stopped lying about immigrants and repeating over and over the false and dehumanizing label of “gangs” and “gang members” against entire populations of hardworking immigrants. That is why a federal judge on Monday slapped down its effort to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. ‘Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes,’ the judge wrote.

And now we have an ICE official in south Texas telling a federal court that an “administrative error” and an “oversight” had led his team to put Abrego-Garcia on a plane with accused gang members bound to El Salvador’s infamous mass prison. Link by link, the authorities forged a chain of lies that now shackles Abrego-Garcia.

The ICE official declared: “The removal was carried out in good faith.”

The following is a statement from NDLON’s Co-Executive Director Pablo Alvarado:

“Six years ago, in what appears to have been an unfounded arrest, the police picked up a day laborer outside a Home Depot in suburban Maryland. Now he is in the black hole of a Salvadoran prison.

“The Trump Administration illegally sent someone to prison in a country where a court said they would face harm. And all the Administration can say is: Oops?

“An immigration judge had protected Abrego-Garcia from deportation in 2019 because he was in danger from Salvadoran gangs. But Abrego-Garcia had no protection from the gang led by the Trump White House. Their assault on this innocent man is an assault on the whole immigration court system. What part of ‘illegal don’t they understand?”