Like a dog on a bone, the corporate media and progressive pundits can’t let go of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a citizen of El Salvador currently housed in the that country’s Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo), or CECOT. It’s the latest in a succession of manufactured scandals that, like that dog’s bone, is gnawed to nothing over time.
The media and progressive narrative is crumbling. Garcia, who illegally entered the United States more than a decade ago, was allowed to work in Maryland, but was not granted asylum in the 2019 immigration case the Trump Administration allegedly skirted. Nor was Garcia given a green card or a path to citizenship. The “Maryland man” is now back in the country of his origin, having been transported there by the Trump Administration. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has declined to return him to the United States.
Garcia sought asylum in America because he feared Barrio 18, an El Salvadorian gang. Why would Garcia need protection from Barrio 18? Is it because Barrio 18 is the chief rival or the El Salvadorian gang MS-13 and they had it in for Garcia? Garcia claimed that Barrio 18 was extorting his family. I can find no evidence for this claim. But there is evidence that he is a MS-13 gang member.
The 2019 case was an immigration proceedings following Garcia’s detention by ICE. ICE determined he was an MS-13 gang member based on a confidential informant’s claim and a Gang Field Interview Sheet. Garcia was with Christhyan Hernandez-Romero and Jose Guillermo Dominguez, known MS-13 gang members, both members of the Sailor’s clique.
According to the field report, “During the interview officers observed he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations. Officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture. The meaning of the clothing is to represent ‘ver, oir y callar’ or ‘see no evil, hear no evil and say no evil.’ Wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents that they are a member in good standing with the MS-13. Officers contacted past proven and reliable source of information, who advised [that Garcia] is an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique. The confidential source further advised that he is the rank of ‘Chequeo’ with the moniker of ‘Chele.’”
In April 2019, an immigration judge denied Garcia bond, citing the informant’s allegation as sufficient evidence of gang ties. In October 2019, another immigration judge denied his asylum request but granted him “withholding of removal” to El Salvador (keep in mind that immigration judges are administrative officers who often facilitate immigration agendas). Garcia was required to check in with ICE annually. His presence in our country was therefore provisional and there were questions about his associations.
But there are other troubling elements of this case. Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, on two occasions in 2021, sought a restraining order against her husband alleging domestic violence, according to a court filing posted on X by the Department of Homeland Security (see above). The affidavit alleges that Garcia punched and scratched Sura, bloodying and bruising her—all this in the presence of their baby. Sura expressed fear of being near him, citing her safety concerns. However, she did not appear in court for the hearings, and the requests for the restraining order were not pursued further. While it’s possible that Sura chose not to proceed, factors such as fear, intimidation, or external pressures could have prevented her attendance. No specific details confirm these possibilities, but that is expected in such cases.
Moreover, in 2022, Garcia was stopped by the Tennessee Highway Patrol (THP) illegally transporting seven immigrants from Houston to Maryland on an invalid drivers license. The officer suspected Abrego Garcia was engaged in human trafficking. The THP contacted the FBI for guidance, and within a couple of hours, the FBI requested that Garcia and his passengers be released. The THP complied with this request, and no arrests or charges were made in connection to the incident. Why would Biden’s FBI instruct the THP to release a man known to ICE as a MS-13 gang member and allow him to continue transporting illegal immigrants to Maryland on an invalid drivers license? I think readers know the answer to this question.
We are hearing very little about any of this in the legacy media and progressives defending Garcia. They aren’t asking questions about the relevant facts. You’re hearing about a “Maryland dad” with a wife and an autistic child. If you hear about the allegation against him, the spin is that the allegations are doubtful and that he was mistakenly rolled up (in an “administrative error”) in an ICE operation to deport MS-13 gang members. Why won’t the media give you the straight facts? Why won’t journalists ask the relevant questions? Why are Democratic politicians grandstanding over the case? Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland flew to El Salvador to “get answers” about the “wrongful deportation” of a “Maryland migrant.” He was rebuffed.
Did Van Hollen violate the Logan Act which prohibits US citizens from engaging in unauthorized diplomacy with foreign governments to influence disputes or undermine US policy? Border Czar Tom Homan argues that Van Hollen’s actions constituted unauthorized diplomacy, especially since Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele rejected Garcia’s release, aligning with the Trump administration’s stance.
Van Hollen defenders counter that he acted as a US senator, not a private citizen, that Senators often engage in foreign travel and discussions as part of their oversight and constituent service roles, and that his meetings with US embassy officials and Salvadoran authorities were consistent with congressional duties. Accepting all that, the question still remains: why is Van Hollen representing a deported El Salvadorian citizen who was denied asylum and a green card, is almost certainly a MS-13 gang member, assaulted his wife, and stopped for trafficking immigrants across state lines on an invalid driver’s license?
There are at least three related reasons for the corporate media spin and broad Democrat support for criminal aliens. First, the media and the Democratic Party want to keep cheap immigrant labor in America because it benefits the oligarchy they represent. The spin is a continuation of the propaganda war prosecuted against the American populace during Trump’s first term, the aim of which is to turn public opinion against the President’s policy. Second, and more deeply, these forces are attempting to delegitimize the Trump Administration because the populist movement he represents is an existential threat to the globalist project. They need to marginalize the movement in the eyes of the populace. Third, the oligarchy wants to divide the American proletariat along ideological lines in order to facilitate elite management of the population. This is the beating heart of multiculturalism project manifest in identity politics, in this case manufacturing ethnic and racial antipathies.
The spin isn’t working. Today’s Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll finds Trump at 50 percent approval, with 48 percent disapproving. Harry Enten at CNN is reporting that if the election were held today, Trump would still prevail over Harris. Democrats, on the other hand, are more unpopular than they have ever been in historic polling. The succession of manufactured scandals—Nazi-style salutes, SignalGate, pardons for January 6 rioters, to name a few—are having little effect other than to feed the confirmation bias of those who already loathe the President and MAGA.
Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” The first part is definitely true. The second and third parts are exaggeration. But the spirit of the quip taken in its entirety is essentially correct. It has become very difficult for the elite to control the population with lies and propaganda. This is because the Internet liberated by Musk’s lead in purchasing Twitter (at a loss), has made the sharing of information too open for falsehoods and misrepresentations to take hold in the way they used to. We are in the midst of a significant political realignment.
Americans want those who should not be in this country deported. According to the Pew Research Center, fewer than one in five Americans oppose deportation. Trump has started with criminal aliens and those associated with criminal gangs and terrorist networks, which is supported by a large majority of Americans. Democrats know that what follows this is mass deportations of everybody who crossed borders into the United States illegally. They’re trying to nip the project in the bud by manufacturing a moral panic over Garcia. He’s their poster boy. But it’s not working.
You know what else isn’t working? The moral panic over tariffs. The panic over Wall Street’s performance of late—the propaganda making it appear as an everyman peril—is designed to mask the fact that the top 10 percent of income earners hold roughly 90 percent of corporate stock value. The fact is that working-class individuals invest smaller amounts in stocks, primarily through retirement plans, while high-net-worth individuals and institutions dominate trading volume and influence market dynamics. Wall Street’s investment landscape reflects the interests of the rich. How quickly we forget that only 15 years ago there were mass protests on the left against Wall Street—and only 25 years ago mass labor and leftwing protests against globalization.
The new tack we see emerging is manufacturing panic over a possible trade embargo between the US and China. To be sure, both sides are engaged in a heated trade war, with actions like China’s reported halt on Boeing jet deliveries and US tariff carve-outs for tech companies exerting strategic economic pressure. But even if there were an embargo, it would mean that US capital would not flow to China, but rather stay here or near, which would facilitate more domestic investment in manufacturing. Even without an embargo, a reduction of capital outflows would manifest to the benefit of American workers.
There is a relevant passage by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The Communist Manifesto (1848) that needs only minor adjustments to capture the spirit of actions pursued by the transnational corporate class against the American businessman and worker, waged through the instrument of the Chinese economic power:
“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
The passage describes how capitalism, in their day driven by the bourgeoisie, leverages cheap goods, communications, and technological advancements to impose itself on all nations, reshaping the world in its image. Today, global capitalism, driven by a transnational elite, is reshaping the United States in the way that earlier iterations of capitalism reshaped the world. In Marx’s time, the metaphor “Chinese walls” symbolized protectionism and resistance to Western influence, drawing from historical perceptions of China’s self-imposed cultural and trade barriers. The usefulness of this metaphor is not time-bounded.
Today, under Trump, it’s America protecting its industries and workers, resisting the resisting the power of globalism to reshape our republic, reconstituting the cultural and trade barriers that made the United States the industrial powerhouse of the world—a title usurped China. The “heavy artillery” is cheap commodities China uses as weapons to break into markets, overcoming resistance, and integrating nations into the global capitalist system. For Marx and Engels, “barbarian nations” referred to the non-industrialized societies that lie outside the capitalist framework. To be sure, the US does not lie outside the capitalist framework, but a new framework is being erected, the framework of transnational corporatism, and Trump means to keep America aloof from it. And in the eyes of the globalist, Trump and MAGA are the barbarians.
Cheap Chinese commodities do not in the long run improve the standards of living of American families—only relatively and marginally because of the decline in wages relative to productivity. High-wage/value added manufacturing—and jobs for Americans generally—will raise the standard of living of American families. More people working for higher wages will raise tax revenues and allow the government to pay down the debt (and lower interest rates) enabling it to continue mounting the social programs that help American families and communities. That will come by easing trade deficits, deporting illegal aliens, securing our borders, and restoring the American System. It will come by erecting walls against globalization. Trump’s America First plan is the right plan.
The Garcia case and the globalist agenda are interlinked. Garcia is not a poster boy of the tyranny of the Trump Administration. He is a poster boy of the globalist project that has offshored manufacturing and flooded the United States with cheap foreign labor—a project that has displaced American workers, sunk America into tens of trillions of dollars in debt and put nation on a path to sovereign debt crisis, the restructuring of which will be the dismantling of the republic and full incorporation into the transnational global order. We cannot let that happen.
freedom and reason 