Why the Trump regime shattered the Constitution to crush a 29-year-old Maryland laborer

“What’s Kafkaesque [...] is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces [...] What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.”

— Kafka biographer Frederick Karl, New York Times, 1991

If someone asks you on a pop quiz or at a cocktail party to define the word Kafkaesque, it no longer requires detailed knowledge of Franz Kafka’s novels like The Trial or The Metamorphosis, which chronicle the Everyman’s struggle against the bureaucracy of the decrepit Austro-Hungarian empire, and the circular logic of a repressive regime. In 2025, Kafkaesque has been redefined by the case of 29-year-old Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Everyman of Donald Trump’s America, who doesn’t stand a chance.

Abrego Garcia’s surrealistic journey began the seemingly routine day of March 12, when — driving home after working at his union construction job and picking up his stepson from a relative’s home — a federal agent pulled him over, arrested him, and took him away in handcuffs in an episode that feels ripped from the pages of the early 20th-century Prague novelist.

Since then, Abrego Garcia — never convicted of a crime — has been shackled with other immigrants and flown to one of the world’s most notorious prison camps in his native El Salvador, in what a soon-to-be-fired government lawyer admitted was a bureaucratic error. Under judicial pressure, including a U.S. Supreme Court order to return Abrego Garcia to U.S. soil, Trump’s Justice Department only complied after securing a criminal indictment of the Salvadoran that a federal jurist has found highly problematic.

The government’s public actions toward this one wrongly deported man are appalling, but this is only half the story. Thanks to a courageous whistleblower — yes, that same government lawyer who was punished for telling the truth about Abrego Garcia — we are learning about an arguably Watergate-level push within the Justice Department to defy any judicial orders aimed at returning the Maryland laborer, or halting similarly troubled deportations.

The government of a global superpower is ripping up its own Constitution and pressing with its full weight to crush one formerly anonymous laborer with a work permit, a union card, and three kids at home, who was doing his best to live the American dream after fleeing gang violence and death threats in his birth city of San Salvador at age 16.

Indeed, liberty for Abrego Garcia poses such a threat to the “red Caesar” authoritarian ambitions of the Trump regime and the mass deportation drive at its black heart that Trump’s minions are determined, by any means necessary, to make sure he never again freely breathes American air.

As a federal magistrate weighs releasing Abrego Garcia — now jailed in Nashville, where he was indicted — on overinflated human trafficking charges, Justice Department attorneys and the Department of Homeland Security officials have made clear that any release on bail would cause the government to simply lock up Abrego Garcia on new immigration charges, or possibly deport him to some other third country, such as South Sudan, now that the Supreme Court has green-lighted this dubious practice. Said DHS chief spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, “He will never go free on American soil.”

» READ MORE: Why Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the Jenga piece that could topple the American Experiment | Will Bunch

What on earth did Abrego Garcia do to deserve this? When I first wrote about this case back in April, I headlined the column with a claim that might have sounded like journalistic hyperbole to some: that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the Jenga piece that could topple the American Experiment.” Nearly 10 weeks later, that prediction feels prescient, as we learn of a Nixonian web of lies and cover-ups to keep one immigrant under the thumb of the U.S. government.

One irony is that in bending over backward to smear Abrego Garcia as a bad person who is not worthy of our empathy, the Trump regime has shown all of us what’s really at stake in its war on 249 years of democratic norms. It’s actually true that, in an oft-ridiculed media trope, this undocumented immigrant was no angel. I do find quite troubling the allegations of domestic abuse that caused Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, to briefly seek a protective order. But not only have Sura and others cast Abrego Garcia’s narrative arc as one of redemption, seeking counseling and becoming a committed and involved dad to three kids with varying disabilities, but that’s not even the point.

Every human on American soil — from abusive husbands to cloistered monks — is entitled to due process. Period. Nothing is more fundamental to the success of the American Experiment. Which is exactly why the awesome power of the current regime — including Trump himself, who went on national TV with the absurd claim that a photoshopped picture showed the gang name “MS-13” tattooed on Abrego Garcia’s hand — is pulling out every stop to deny Abrego Garcia his constitutional rights.

That’s because proving their unstoppable power to deny due process to Abrego Garcia is essential to stripping you of your human rights when the time comes — and that time will come.

The more recent developments in the saga show how Trump’s Justice Department — instead of offering actual due process to Abrego Garcia, which would have involved admitting his wrongful deportation and adjudicating his immigration case while obeying a 2019 order than he cannot be returned to El Salvador — invented a completely different and phony “due process” stacked heavily against Abrego Garcia. In a nation where a famous jurist once said the government “can indict a ham sandwich,” Attorney General Pam Bondi and her team fired up the ovens of cooked justice.

Abrego Garcia’s Nashville indictment is based on a 2022 Tennessee traffic stop for which he was not charged at the time, in a federal investigation that didn’t even start until the botched deportation became a national story, and which caused one Justice prosecutor to resign over alleged political interference. In ordering Abrego Garcia’s release on the pending criminal charges, federal Magistrate Judge Barbara D. Holmes found the indictment was larded with dubious claims about cross-country trips that bordered on “physical impossibility,” and based on hearsay evidence from questionable witnesses.

In the most troubling instance, defense attorneys said that much of the government’s much-ballyhooed claim about Abrego Garcia’s alleged ties to the MS-13 gang is based on testimony from an actual human smuggler and gang leader with two prior felony convictions and five past deportations. This witness seems to have gotten a sweet deal — a deferral of his current deportation, early release to a halfway house, and a work permit — as a result of the story he told prosecutors about Abrego Garcia.

Of course, this would not be the first time in American history that a government prosecution was not all it was cracked up to be. But what’s more alarming are the new allegations from that fired prosecutor-turned-whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, that the government planned to forge ahead with the deportation flight that included Abrego Garcia, even if it meant defying judicial orders and, in essence, the Constitution.

Reuveni and his lawyers at the Government Accountability Project, in a leaked letter, charge that Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal attorney, named to the No. 3 post at Justice and now nominated for a federal judgeship, “made a remark concerning the possibility that a court order would enjoin those removals before they could be effectuated. Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f— you’ and ignore any such court order.”

In subsequent cases over the deportations for which the Trump regime cited the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, Reuveni charged that the Justice Department both ignored court orders and made deliberate misrepresentations. In the Abrego Garcia case specifically, Reuveni said higher-ups told him to label the Maryland laborer as “a terrorist,” which he refused to do, telling his boss, “I didn’t sign up to lie.” He was out on administrative leave hours later, then fired.

There is something very Watergate-ish about all of this. Much like all the president’s men back in the early 1970s, key players in the Trump regime are spinning lies and fostering cover-ups, all in the name of crushing political enemies, silencing dissent, and amassing unchecked power. The difference is that Richard Nixon, despite flirtations with constitutional crisis, did ultimately obey the judiciary. There is little confidence that Trump would do the same, which would signal the end of our democracy as we’ve known it.

The smearing of Abrego Garcia, first with irrelevant imperfections from his past, then with the rotting ham of his overbaked indictment, seeks to make this one immigrant essential worker so unpopular that most Americans won’t care that he’s lost his right to due process. But this is exactly how the other 339,999,999 Americans lose their due process, in a moment when Kafka’s works must be moved out of the fiction section.

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