There was a time in this country when the journey of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the violent streets of El Salvador to a happy if chaotic home in Maryland could have been a glossy brochure for the American Dream — a wonderful life that an old-time director like Frank Capra might have brought to a Hollywood screen.

It’s a tale packed with drama: The street gang in San Salvador that threatened 12-year-old Kilmar over the money from delivering his mom’s pupusas, leading to his 2011 migration to the United States. How Abrego Garcia and his American wife, Jennifer, were married after his detainment while seeking work in a Home Depot parking lot, with a guard passing the wedding rings through the glass barrier. Or the immigration judge who gave him the break to find a good union job.

But the sad reality is that we only know about this Salvadoran’s American Dream because of the nightmare plot twist when President Donald Trump and his regime of mass deportation arrived this January. Abrego Garcia was pulled over and arrested by federal agents, shackled and loaded onto a plane on the Ides of March, and thrown with a shaved head into El Salvador’s concentration camp, all because of what U.S. officials were later forced to admit was “an administrative error.”

There was also a time in this country when that mistake would have prompted a simple phone call from the so-called leader of the free world to the president of El Salvador that would bring Abrego Garcia back to American soil, to offer him constitutionally guaranteed due process to sort out his future. Instead, the top officials of the current U.S. government have unleashed a fire hose of over-the-top lies about this immigrant — anything to keep him locked up in a notorious Central American hellhole, where his family and attorney can’t even confirm if he’s dead or alive.

Even in a nation that, just in my lifetime, has endured the absurd falsehoods of LBJ’s Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s Watergate and Donald Trump’s first term, the ugly and completely fabricated words about Abrego Garcia coming from the White House, the Justice Department, and Homeland Security are the most hideous governmental untruths I’ve ever heard.

It’s bad enough that the core of the government’s case for Abrego Garcia’s deportation and harsh treatment — an evidence-free charge of ties to the Salvadoran gang MS-13 — is based on a Chicago Bulls cap, an informant who placed him in a locale (Long Island) he’s never even visited, and a cop who at roughly the same time was kicked off the force for lying.

But the realization — acknowledged by Justice Department lawyers (including one who was fired for being honest) — that Abrego Garcia never should have been on that plane has triggered an unconscionable torrent of lies, with the Department of Homeland Security absurdly claiming he’s “involved in human trafficking.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the refugee of “hiding in Maryland” — by going to his job every day, with a work permit? — and as “not a candidate for father of the year,” even after the hardworking dad was arrested while driving his 5-year-old autistic son who is deaf in one ear and nonverbal.

The White House’s desperation to keep Abrego Garcia in the gulag also prompted a search for damaging dirt on the immigrant, even if it held no relevance for whether he’s entitled to due process, or whether the executive branch must follow judicial orders. Thus, Leavitt on Wednesday dredged up a 2021 incident in which a moment of spousal violence caused Abrego Garcia’s wife to file for a civil protective order, later withdrawn. I abhor domestic violence, but I also believe Jennifer Vasquez Sura when she says her husband went to counseling and has since worked hard at being a good spouse and father. One bad mistake doesn’t terminate a person’s human rights.

This torrent of lies and diversion coming from the very top of American government hasn’t only bamboozled regular folks on their Fox News-addled sofas, but it seems to have befuddled our hopelessly naive pundit class as well. Why, they ask, doesn’t the Trump administration just admit its mistake and ask their good buddy, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, “the world’s coolest dictator,” to send Abrego Garcia back? Not just because the U.S. Supreme Court ordered them, by a 9-0 vote, to “facilitate” exactly that, but because it would be the humane, sensible thing to do.

They don’t get it, do they? The TV talking heads are clueless, because they are asking the president-who-would-be-king and his minions to do something that would cause the entire regime to unravel like a ball of thread: acknowledge that Abrego Garcia is a human being.

That’s because to acknowledge not only that Abrego Garcia and his family are worthy of empathy — which they are, very much so — but that he holds basic rights, including due process, both under the U.S. Constitution and a democratic social order, would upend the mass-deportation regime at the heart of the new American tyranny.

If the Trump administration can be forced — by the courts and the fundamental rule of law, or by the rising chorus of angry public opinion — to treat Abrego Garcia not just fairly but humanely, then shouldn’t similar justice be afforded to Venezuelans such as the makeup artist Andry José Hernández Romero or youth soccer coach Jerce Reyes Barrios, deported to the same concentration camp as Abrego Garcia because of a misreading of their tattoos?

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And if the creaky wheels of U.S. democracy can restart to halt those unjust deportations, shouldn’t the shocking detainments of international college students such as Columbia’s Mohsen Mahdawi — a pro-Palestinian protest leader who’s adopted nonviolent Buddhism and denounced antisemitism — for exercising their First Amendment free-speech rights also be reversed as profoundly un-American?

The reality is that the Trump regime — despite the outward stupidity of so much that it does — deeply understands that its ability to control the fate of this one humble Maryland sheetworker is essentially the loose Jenga block upon which the tottering American Experiment is swaying between democracy and dictatorship.

The increasingly unhinged public denunciations of Abrego Garcia by the likes of Attorney General Pam Bondi — who by Wednesday was falsely calling him “one of the top MS-13 members,” and “a terrorist,” inflating the disinformation bubble — is aimed at popular support for the bigger goals here: Total defiance of the judicial branch, even the Supreme Court. Cementing the right to send prisoners to a foreign gulag without due process, soon escalating to U.S. citizens. And holding in their back pocket the Insurrection Act, and the ability to call up troops to crush the inevitable protests.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the critical pawn in a game to end American democracy for good.

And the regime knows its window for pulling this off is closing. The polls are showing that Trump’s popularity with the American people is plummeting, and support for his immigration policies is also shrinking, after people see its rank cruelty. The conventional wisdom is that the president should pull back, but the conventional wisdom has been wrong ever since Trump descended a golden escalator on June 16, 2015. The White House is instead racing to impose dictatorship before opponents can get organized to stop it.

In this life-or-death moment for our liberty, there are still a lot of key people who aren’t getting it, and not just television bloviators. One centrist Democratic member of Congress insisted anonymously to Axios that Trump’s immoral deportation machine is a political trap and that Dems “shouldn’t take the bait for one hairdresser,” tacking a homophobic dog whistle onto a lack of concern over human rights.

Fortunately for democracy, the mass of decent everyday American people do get it. It’s why a throng of people gathered outside a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md., demanding our government obey the law. It’s why Philadelphia suburbanites driving on U.S. 202 in Chester County this week saw their neighbors at an overpass with a giant sign, “Free Abrego Garcia.” It’s why voters at a town hall in deeply conservative rural Iowa confronted GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley and cheered raucously when one asked, “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?”

They understand the most important fact in America right now: that if Abrego Garcia is not free, then none of us are free. The Trump regime understands this, too, but in a very different way. They see this everyman Salvadoran laborer as the speed bump on their autobahn toward a strongman regime of unchecked corruption and naked retribution against anyone from powerful universities and law firms to college-newspaper op-ed writers who dares oppose them. And they are spinning yet another Big Lie to make sure Abrego Garcia is crushed.

But we have seen, time and time again, that injustice to one simple man can change the arc of history. It was one oppressed Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi who launched the massive Arab Spring protests, and it was the captured-on-video 2020 police murder of George Floyd that triggered the largest protest in American history. This time, we need to bend the arc a lot further toward justice, and we need to do so in the name of Abrego Garcia.

There will be yet another opportunity this Saturday, with a new round of Easter weekend protests in all 50 states and beyond — and it’s clear now that everything is on the line. Let the chants of liberation ring loudly from Maine to Hawaii: Free Kilmar Abrego Garcia!

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