Abrego Garcia has been returned to the United States. What a relief!
I have no idea whether the charges against him have any merit, but it’s still a victory that he has been returned to the states.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia back in US to face charges of helping traffic ‘thousands’ of migrants
Mistakenly deported Salvadoran native Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been brought back to the United States where he will face criminal charges for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the U.S.
More than two months after the Trump administration admitted it mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia from Maryland to his native El Salvador, a federal grand jury has indicted him for allegedly transporting undocumented migrants within the United States.
A two-count indictment, which was filed under seal in federal court in Tennessee last month and unsealed Friday, alleges Abrego Garcia, 29, participated in a yearslong conspiracy to haul undocumented migrants from Texas to the interior of the country.
MORE: Justice Department investigating 2022 Abrego Garcia traffic stop: Sources
He was scheduled to have his initial court appearance Friday in the Middle District of Tennessee.Abrego Garcia’s return follows a series of court battles in which the Trump administration repeatedly said it was unable to bring him back, drawing the country toward the brink of a constitutional crisis when the administration failed to heed the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, in an online press briefing, called the charges against his client “an abuse of power.”
“They’ll stop at nothing at all — even some of the most preposterous charges imaginable just to avoid admitting that they made a mistake, which is what everyone knows happened in this case,” said attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg.
Open thread.
Great News from The Civics Center – A $5,000 Match
Baud
Exactly right.
Mathguy
Sounds like the orange moron regime scum think this is a “creative solution”. I’m always amazed how low they’ll go.
WaterGirl
Just to be clear, the Breathtaking Criminality and Lawlessness tag on this post refers to the maladministration, not to the charges against Abrego Garcia!
Suzanne
Yes. Our interest is that he gets his due process and a fair trial.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: From the article:
I assume it was filed in TN because that is likely to be a sympathetic court for the maladministration,
but maybe he lives in TN, in which case that would not be the case.*He doesn’t live in TN.
WaterGirl
I hope Garcia and his family are suing the shit out of the government.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: i thought he had originally been arrested in Maryland. But my memory could be faulty.
Ken B
@WaterGirl: I think he lives in Maryland.
WaterGirl
@Chetan Murthy: @Ken B:
I was trying to give the maladministration the benefit of the doubt – definitely a momentary lapse in judgment on my part!
Scout211
Bondi speaks. And bullshit comes out of her mouth.
NPR
Forgot to add:
::rolls eyes::
Bukele is such a big help. ///
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: Or if he is alleged to have committed the crime there, in which case that’s where it would be filed. That’s my understanding, but obvs the BJ attorneys should weigh in.
I will stick to steel and concrete and air space.
Josie
@WaterGirl: I thought that the senator who went to see him was from Maryland and considered Mr. Abrego Garcia to be a constituent.
ETA: Never mind. Already covered.
Chetan Murthy
@WaterGirl: I’m going with Daniel Davies’ 1-minute MBA, one of whose rules is: “fibbers’ forecasts are worthless”. These are known liars, I’m not going to give them the benefit of the doubt. They need to prove every last thing. Every last thing.
oldgold
@WaterGirl: It is Tennessee because that is where he was stopped in 2022 with a vehicle full of people.
Old School
@WaterGirl: Tennessee was the site of a traffic stop.
Chetan Murthy
It’s pretty clear to all of us that the pic we saw with “MS13” on Mr. Abrego Garcia’s fingers is a photoshop. One of the things we’ve all heard, is that you can *tell* a photoshop, by looking at the pixels in the image. I wonder if anybody’s done that. It seems like a standard (albeit specialized) sort of test.
rikyrah
These are BULLSHYT CHARGES😠
John Revolta
@Chetan Murthy: Hey Chet- are you able to get in over at LGM? All I can see is the header. Been that way for a couple hours…….
TONYG
@Baud: It’s better than being abandoned in the gulag, but this accusation of trafficking “thousands of migrants” sounds like total bullshit to me. What, exactly, were the logistics of this mass migration? Why wasn’t he charged with this “very plausible” crime two months ago? We’ll see what comes out in court, but this really sounds like bullshit to me.
cmorenc
Didn’t Florida Gov DeSantis commit the same crime of “transporting undocumented immigrants within the US” when he sent a planeload of them to NY and Mass?
Also, aren’t most landscaping firm in the US is guilty of this same crime, every day when they send their crews out to work clients’ properties – which crews are often predominate comprised of Hispanic Spanish-speaking workers with little to no command of English.
Are they claiming Garcia is a professional “mule” who, for hire, drove van-fulls of undoumented workers from Texas to northern states, or is this going to turn out to nothing more than a few undocumented folks he personally knew a ride?
Chetan Murthy
@John Revolta: yes. my experience:
it loads, but then soon after, something more loads, which drags the footer up to just below the header. If I hit ESC soon after loading, that interrupts the proocess. Then I can click on a post, and the same process happens, though I need to wait long enough for enough of the Disqus plugin to load that the comments can load.
I infer that there’s something wrong with some plugin that loads late in the page-load process. It also happens the same way in incognito mode.
Scout211
@Chetan Murthy: A reporter confronted Trump with the photoshopping of that image. That discussion did not go well.
Baud
@TONYG:
My going in assumption with everything these people do is that it’s bullshit. We’ll see.
Chetan Murthy
@cmorenc: @TONYG: @rikyrah: I have a theory (and it is mine). I read that Mr. Abrego Garcia got stopped (a traffic stop) while driving a vehicle with 8 others onboard. His attorney explained that he works construction, and he was going from one jobsite to another. My bet is, there were undocumented immigrants in the vehicle. Bondi will
(a) allege that some of them were MS-13 (ooga booga)
(b) that this is just one leg of a cross-country smuggling ring
(c) RICO! RICO! RICO!
And voila, he’s on the hook for the entire operation. It’ll turn out that the evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia was part of the ring is entirely hearsay on the part of co-conspirators who are getting something for ratting him out, and who don’t actually have any proof that he was a part of it. They’ll try to drag this out long enough that he’ll get tired of staying in prison, and will end up pleading out to a lesser charge/time served, and then they’ll deport him.
They’ve done this shit before: drag out the prosecution (and detention) long enough that the person just pleads out to get it over with.
The Rule of Law, folks!
Chetan Murthy
@Scout211: I remember that. And for sure, it’s obvious to the naked eye that the image is ‘shopped. I mean something more:
(1) use software to -find- the font from which these characters were taken. I’m sure that’s a straightforward thing for those who do this stuff.
(2) at the edges of each character, where they meet the actual image, I’m betting there are pixels that have artifacts — that’s one of the things that Photoshop does. I’m betting these can be identified, and can -prove- that the image was photoshopped.
So it’s no longer “who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes”, but rather “the program says it’s shopped, my dude, and with the font XYZ-BLURFL-512”.
Jay
It’s a two count indictment from a Grand Jury on the lesser charges.
The old saying goes, a half assed prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich.
Pam Bondi and TACO’s Nazi SpokesBarbi have already blown the Prosecution’s case up, by making public allegations of greater crimes, with out charging those alleged crimes.
Between his Unions support, and all the white shoe Law Firms and Lawyers TACO47 has pissed off,…………………………………………………
I suspect that the “trial” will last just long enough to keep the “Usual Suspects” frothing until their next outrage takes over, and the charges will be dropped.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a bunch of Jan6er’s have opened a $100million dollar lawsuit against TACO47’s DOJ. I wonder how quickly Pam will move to settle and for how much. After all, it’s not her money.
John Revolta
@Chetan Murthy: Okay thanks. Mrs Revolta can’t get in either so I’m gonna assume it’s them and not me.
Chetan Murthy
@Chetan Murthy: Here’s part of what i mean;
Imagine that some Godlike tattoo artist tattooed these characters “MS13” onto Mr. Abrego Garcia’s fingers. Imagine it: just go with it. Then you would (you MUST) expect that they will not be perfectly flat — his fingers are irregular cylinders, and his skin is not perfectly flat. So regardless of how good the artist is, regardless of how he tattoos on the characters, they’re not going to show up in the image the same way that Photoshopped characters from the font would show up.
There will be differences, and easy-to-spot differences. That should be discernible in a way that is impossible-to-deny. Not “hard-to-deny”, but “impossible-to-deny”.
WTFGhost
First, they insisted he was a member of MS-13, and a horrible person; then, they invent charges by using jailhouse snitches; I don’t call this good news.
No person is allowed to lose their freedom, without due process. Once the Trump administration broke the law – remember, a law the President is duty-bound to see is faithfully executed – they should have reversed the mistake. Instead, they manufactured charges.
It is terrible news that they manufactured charges against him, it’s terrible this is being reported as if the charges have some presumed legitimacy, and it’s terrible the lawlessness of the entire “let’s deprive people of freedom, without due process,” is allowed to continue, without any fear of consequence for any person engaging in this kind of vile abuse of power.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: The article I read accused him of transporting illegal immigrants in TX, so I’m guessing my first thought is the correct one.
Judge shopping.
Of course I always like to hear what the BJ attorneys have to say.
WaterGirl
@oldgold: Ah. Okay, thank you.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Chetan Murthy:
It’s good Garcia is back in the US.
I do think it’s bullshit that he’d be deported back to El Salvador if convicted and served his prison term when an immigration court already found credible evidence his life would be in danger if he ever went back there
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy: So, in Photoshop, there are tools to make the letters look like they are indeed going back in space, as if they were on a cylinder and you were looking at it from a low angle. And whatever dumbass did that Photoshop wasn’t even good enough at it to do that.
WaterGirl
@TONYG: They were let go in 2022. This looks like total made-up bullshit to me… “Okay, if they’re gonna make us bring him back, what can we charge him with”?
But we shall see. Maybe.
Chetan Murthy
Well, in defense of whoever did it, I doubt they meant it to look like the “MS13” was really tattoos. They were there as a visual guide for the actual tattoos. It’s b/c Lumpy looked at ’em and said “AHA! MS13” that everybody changed their story and now they’re supposed to be real.
Even if one used that mapping algorithm to which you allude, it should still be straightforward to prove that they were ‘shopped, since human skin isn’t smooth, right? It’s lumpy, it stretches, etc. So if the characters were mapped by such a cylindrical mapping, you should be able to back-calculate the parameters of the mapping. And that would show that it was indeed a mapping, and not a real tattoo.
But yeah, it’s so GODDAMN DUMBASS, it’s just a fucking insult to the intelligence to be confronted with shit so fucking stupid.
WTFGhost
@Scout211: She’s playing to the lie that this was “delicate foreign policy negotiations” that the courts can’t can’t can’t CAN’T say anything about ever, ever, ever, ever ever, never!
Alas, when the President breaks the law, the courts are allowed to say “you broke the law; you have to follow the law.”
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, even good Photoshop is detectable. But this was, like, laughably bad. Visible-to-the-naked-untrained-eye bad. Like, could have hired a student intern in graphics and gotten better work.
ETA: Photoshop has some overlay and multiply functions that could make it appear more like it was a tattoo over skin.
Chetan Murthy
@Suzanne: YES! Which is why I’m a little disappointed that none of the folks who do this “detect it’s a ‘shop” for reals, did that. I googled back when the image came out, and again today, and found no such debunkings. Which is sad, since (as you rightly note) the job is so goddamn shoddy.
Timill
@WaterGirl: As I remarked elsewhere, in the UK the standard warning includes: “But, it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.”
They’re relying on this traffic stop without having previously mentioned it in any hearing. It’s all made up to make the administration look good.
WTFGhost
@WaterGirl: The odds are *very* good that it’s breathtaking lawlessness and criminality, just, not on the part of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
This is also the worst *type* of breathtaking lawlessness and criminality, where the power of the state is leveled against an innocent individual – because we know damn well Trump didn’t have any evidence of wrongdoing, until he found something he could invent from.
(Okay, okay: “we know damn well that it’s nearly certain that there is no evidence of wrongdoing, and we know that Trump would say all this, regardless of the evidence, AND, we know the lottery-winning odds that Mr. Abrego Garcia was an actual criminal, who just happened to be swept up by the secret police for deportation. But, yes, it’s not *IMPOSSIBLE* that Trump got that lucky, it’s just so far outside the realm of believability that corrupt actions, and perversions of the justice system, are far, far, more believable.)
Suzanne
@Chetan Murthy: To be fair….. no debunking is needed. It’s the 21st century version of cutting letters out of the newspaper and pasting them on.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
I’m surprised they didn’t try to use AI for it, but then AI still can’t make great hands without screwing up the # of fingers
WTFGhost
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, the original was something like “there’s marijuana for M, smiley-face for S, something stupid for 1 (a cross, maybe?), and a skull, which meant 3, because if it didn’t mean 3, the ‘shopper would be a complete effing imbecile, studying to be an ignoramus.
I think the excuse was, “the skull used to be a 3!” but why encode M, S, and 1 as different things?
(In other news, I’m officially nearly feverish – 99.9. I’m probably ready for a covid-19 test.)
Suzanne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): AI still looks so uncanny valley to me. And OMG it cannot do floor plans yet!
The Audacity of Krope
That’s a funny way of spelling “Greg Abbott.”
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: In the upstairs thread, valued commenter gene108 notes that this charge is related to an incident that occurred in Nashville. That would explain the charge.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: Yes, that’s why I referred to the fact that they were let go in 2022. (That was in Nashville in 2022.)
It’s just bullshit. They didn’t charge anyone then, but they decided to charge in 3 years later??
Bullshit.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: Oh, it is definitely bullshit. Most assuredly.
Eyeroller
@Chetan Murthy: You don’t need to go to that level of detail, it was comically bad. I don’t think it was ever intended, even by whoever made it, to look like it was actually on his knuckles. It was intended as an “illustration” of how the tatoos allegedly translated to MS-14. But Trump is so stupid he took it literally.
Chetan Murthy
@Eyeroller: You and I and everyone else dealing in good faith can see that. But a mechanized proof would dispel any doubt and force the bad-faith assholes to come up with another story. Which they would, for sure. But it’d still be useful to have.
And as you say, it’s so -obvious- the chars are there as a visual aid.
Eyeroller
@Suzanne: As I mentioned (and I hadn’t read through comments) and Chetan just said, it doesn’t appear that it was actually intended to look like the letters and numbers were tatooed. They were just “translations.” And some people even said it wasn’t even Photoshop, just something like MS Paint or a similar very simple image-editing program. But Trump is too stupid and/or racist to notice.
davek319
@John Revolta: Yeah.DNS attack, maybe.
JoyceH
@Chetan Murthy: That Photoshop in particular wasn’t meant to deceive or make people believe those letters and numbers were actually tattooed on the skin. The claim was that the finger tattoos signified MS13 and the added lettering was supposed to be a sort of subtitle – this tattoo means M etc. (That interpretation isn’t true BTW, but that was the claim.) It was Trump who’s such an idiot that he didn’t get what the photo with labels was about and actually seemed to believe that the label was part of the tattoo.
Scout211
Sure, because his handlers told him what it was and told him what to say to reporters. He’s far too lazy to do his own research. I bet today he still thinks Terry Moran was trying to trick him into thinking it was photoshopped.
Eyeroller
@Scout211: I tend to think he’s genuinely that stupid/demented but that’s my prejudice. Your explanation is not mutually exclusive with my hypothesis anyway. But his seeming confusion and irritation when the reporter challenged it suggests to me that he believed it.
Msb
TACO – push and he folds. Keep pushing!
columbusqueen
Pam Bondi can eat a bag of salted dicks til she chokes on them. What a lying piece of scum & an utter disgrace to the profession.
Paul in KY
Great news! Glad he is back in his country, where he can now properly answer any charges against him.