by Ludovico Bianchi
Abrego Garcia is a 29 -year -old man, originally from El Salvador, married to an American town, father of three children born in the United States. He lived legally in Maryland with a humanitarian residence permit granted in 2019, after a court had exonerated him from the accusation of having links with the Gang MS-13. Yet his destiny has turned into a ordeal made of arbitrary arrests, deportations and forced returns, into a judicial ping-ping that bare the fractures of the American system and the ruthless anti-immigrant policy put in place by the Trump presidency.
An “administrative error” that weighs like a boulder
Last March, tells the New York Times (March 12, 2025), Abrego was arrested as he went to get one of his children. The agents claimed that his permit was no longer valid. False: the documents showed the opposite. But within a few days he was loaded on an airplane for El Salvador together with hundreds of other migrants, largely Venezuelan, deported on charges of belonging to criminal bands.
Was locked up in the notorious Cacotthe maximum security prison created by the Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to concentrate thousands of suspicious gang members. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have long denounced the inhuman conditions in that prison: overcrowded cells, torture, systematic beating. Right there Abrego’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, recognized her husband in a propaganda video released by the US authorities, where she appeared with her clearly visible tattoos (The GuardianMarch 24, 2025).
The same Trump administration, stuck by legal appeals, had to admit that it was an “administrative error” (Political23 August 2025). But that admission did not change the substance: Abrego was not immediately back.
The institutional clash: Courts against White House
A federal judge of Maryland, Paula Xinis, ordered the government to immediately return to Abrego and bring it back to the American soil. The response of the Department of Justice was to ask the Supreme Court to suspend the order, claiming that the federal courts have no jurisdiction on the matter (Washington Post25 August 2025).
The Supreme Court took time, but in the meantime Abrego remained in the cell in San Salvador. “Once the man has been delivered to the Salvadorane authorities, he is no longer under our custody,” he argued the administration. A position that has the flavor of the Alibi: for Washington, bringing it back would mean c over the muscle narrative that Trump and his allies are building on immigration.
Mass deportations such as propaganda
Second Reuters (25 August 2025), in the same weeks in which Abrego was expelled, hundreds of other Latin American migrants were sent to El Salvador. It is one of the most advertised operations by the Administration, a propaganda weapon aimed at the conservative electorate. Showing prisons full of “criminals” is a message that is worth a thousand speeches.
That’s why only one deporteate risks undermining Trump’s political credibility. So much so that even vice-president JD Vance has relaunched false accusations on X, calling Abrego a “condemned member of the MS-13” (New York Post23 August 2025). Judicial documents, however, say the opposite.
The machine of the jammed law
During a hearing, a lawyer from the Department of Justice, Erez Reuveni, confessed his impotence: “I don’t know why Abrego was expelled. I asked for explanations several times, I have never received a satisfactory response”. Shortly thereafter he was suspended from the service (New York TimesMarch 18, 2025). A scene that shows how even those who represent the state ends overwhelmed by punitive logic, unable to defend their choices before the judges.
A national symbol
Today, after being brought back to the United States to face accusations of human trafficking – accusations that he and his lawyers define a blackmail – Abrego was arrested again in Baltimore, with the shadow of a deportation to Uganda, a country with which he has no link (Ap news25 August 2025).
His name has become a symbol. Dozens of activists have shouted it outside the Ice offices: “Shame!”, “Yes if puede”. In him they review the fate of thousands of broken families, the daily fear of those who live in Trump’s America by “unwanted foreigner”. The Abrego case tells us a lot about today’s America. It is not only the story of an immigrant Salvadoregno with American wife and children. It is a test bench to understand if America remains a country in which the judges still have the last word, or if the executive can trample on sentences and fundamental rights in the name of propaganda. The America that Trump promises to his voters is that of bukele prisons, of deportation as a deterrent, of suspicion as proof. But the America who resists, in the courtrooms and in the squares where people scream “yes if puede”, is the one who refuses to give in to the arbitrariness.
