After he was granted permission in 2019 to stay in the United States by an immigration judge due to the fact that he faced a genuine threat of being killed in his native El Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia got work as a sheet metal apprentice in Maryland and joined the Local 100 of SMART, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, a union with nearly a quarter-million members. Abrego Garcia was making a life for himself in this country, supporting his wife and three kids, including a 5 year-old with autism who is unable to speak. But on March 12, despite never having been charged with a crime, Abrego Garcia was picked up by ICE and shipped off to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, the notoriously deadly prison in El Salvador, which is likely filled with members of Barrio 18, the gang that harassed and threatened him and his family. The federal government claims that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, although that's based on one shitty informant and no evidence, and they also admit that he shouldn't have been kidnapped off the streets of Baltimore and trafficked to CECOT. It was "an administrative error," said lawyers for our skeevy government.
You might know most of this. You might also know that the US Supreme Court, in a 9-0 decision, said that the Trump administration had to, at the very least, facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia with a timeline to be decided by a district court. Judge Paula Xinis quickly demanded that the White House provide daily updates on its efforts bring back Abrego Garcia, and, in its inimitably dickish way, the State Department said, "Yeah, sorry, he's in El Salvador now. We can't do shit." Again, you might know all of this because it's frankly one of the most frightening, extreme, and enraging things ever done by any president ever. I'll get to the implications of what the Trump administration said in a sec, but, at the most basic level, this was a blatantly illegal act, denying due process, which is what would have prevented the mistake.
But even more instructive has been the reaction from Abrego Garcia's union, SMART: they are fucking pissed off about Abrego Garcia. The union held a rally on April 4 in support of Abrego Garcia and his family. SMART General President Michael Coleman, in a statement, tied Abrego Garcia directly to the rights of workers and to what is supposed to be the promise of this country: "In his pursuit of the life promised by the American dream, Brother Kilmar was literally helping to build this great country. What did he get in return? Arrest and deportation to a nation whose prisons face outcry from human rights organizations. SMART condemns his treatment in the strongest possible terms, and we demand his rightful return." Coleman has called on government to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights, and the union has a GoFundMe for Abrego Garcia and his family. The statement on the fundraiser says, "The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process. The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable."
At a gathering of the leadership and delegates of the North America Building Trades Unions, which SMART is a part of, the president of that organization of 3 million members, Sean McGarvey, loudly and angrily said that the union "means all of us. All of us. Including our brother, SMART Apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand be returned to us and his family now!" He slapped his hand on the lectern for emphasis, yelling, "Bring him home!" as the gathered audience of mostly older and middle-aged white men stood up and applauded and cheered.
You got that? One of the biggest union groups in the country has made opposition to Abrego Garcia's kidnapping (and that's what it needs to be called because that's sure as shit what it was) a rallying point, and it's invited its millions of members to join in. Because that's what you do fucking well do: you stand up to the assholes who are abusing your fellow human beings.
There's a lot to say about the clusterfuck of evil, incompetence, insanity, and brutality involved in the crimes the American government has committed against Abrego Garcia, up to and including the ignoring of the clear orders of the Supreme Court and the district court by the Trump administration. There's a lot to say about how grimly ludicrous it is that no one will just say, "Oh, shit. Our bad" and bring him back, which would lend some minor bit of credibility to the entire cruel exercise of totalitarian power. There's a lot to say about the entire savage exercise of essentially sentencing migrants to prison with no due process and sending them to a place where they will have no rights and then saying, "Ah, well. They now are only El Salvador's problem" (and that goes for all the ones who are allegedly Venezuelan gang members -prove it, motherfuckers). There's so much more to say in general; I'll just add that there's also one hell of a story to be written about how some of our prisons in the United States are as bad as CECOT.
But if you were in an opposition party or a group of resisters to the fascist fuckery eating this nation alive, I'd be centering Abrego Garcia's imprisonment as a single thing worth uniting to rally over. It's one of those stories that is easy to comprehend, easy to be on the right side of, and easy to come up with what you want to happen: ICE kidnapped a father of American kids and husband of an American wife who was here in the country legally, lied about who he was, and sent him to prison without charge or trial to the country where violent assholes want him dead. Then they admitted they made a mistake and refuse to correct it. And all we want is for him to come home. There. It's fucking easy. You can get a few hundred thousand union workers pissed off about it, too. To their credit, Democratic lawmakers are speaking out, but we need more, much, much more.
Every cause looks for the incident that lights the fuse on the metaphorical explosives that will make the movement erupt into an unstoppable force. This is the kind of shit that is so egregious, so blatantly awful, so clearly unlawful, and so obviously arrogant that it'll piss off people even beyond the usual cadre of marchers and clever sign creators. Again, the president of a major coalition of unions is ready to go to the wall about it. SMART keeps posting about Abrego Garcia. The fuse is there. Light that fucker.
Hell, use the refusal by Donald Trump to pick up the fucking phone and telling the government of El Salvador, who we're paying to keep our hostages, to send him home as a sign of Trump's weakness. Mr. Art of the Deal can't get a deal on this? Or is Trump just the bitch boy of dictators? Or maybe Garcia was treated so awfully not just in CECOT but while in the custody of the United States that they can't allow him to be able to tell just how much we're abusing innocent people in our fast slide into authoritarianism.
Maybe rallying for the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia won't light that fuse. Maybe it won't accomplish anything beyond getting him back to this family. But, goddamn, that's a pretty big victory. And it points to how we can fight back against these vicious motherfuckers intent on ripping up everything this country ever pretended to stand for.
