False Urgency / Illegal Action / Story Change
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is just the latest example of this very American pattern.
On Monday, April 14, 2025—at a stunning press conference in which the president of the United States hosted the authoritarian president of El Salvador in a warm and friendly conversation in the White House—Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele, and US officials changed the narrative about what exactly happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal apprentice from Baltimore, was unlawfully deported by the federal government in March 2025, and is currently imprisoned along with dozens of other people by order of the US president in El Salvador. My colleague, Alejandra Oliva, wrote an excellent piece about the situation: “Yes, the El Salvador “Deportations” are Really Bad.”
It’s not just the fact that they changed the story, it’s how they changed the story we need to pay attention to. The truth matters now more than ever—for Abrego Garcia, but for everyone else too. In an age of “flooding the zone” with misinformation, keeping our memories intact and our heads clear has never been more critical. There’s a pattern to this that has been part of the DNA of the United States since before we were a country.
Because we’ve defeated it before, I know we can do it again. But we must pay attention to this pattern: false urgency / illegal action / story change.
First, a brief timeline of what happened:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has lived in the US since about 2010. According to NPR, “a federal judge in 2019 granted him protection from being deported, because of concerns for his safety if he were to return to El Salvador.” That means that he was here legally. (Roger Parloff wrote a great deep dive for Lawfare Media about Abrego Garcia’s life and case that I highly recommend.)
On March 12, ICE mistakenly arrested Abrego Garcia in Baltimore, Maryland. According to Parloff, he was driving with his five-year-old son, who is hard of hearing and autistic, in the back to the car. (I cannot imagine his son’s trauma.) ICE called his wife, Jennifer, to come pick up their son or they would turn him over to child welfare (the cruelty cannot be overstated).
On March 15, Abrego Garcia was on one of three flights of men sent to El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento de Terrorismo (CECOT) prison, despite repeated efforts to stop them (again, read Alejandra’s article).
In late March, according to NPR, when the El Salvador government released these now infamous photos of deported men with shaved heads huddled together in rows, Jennifer recognized her husband. This photo, saved by NPR to Document Cloud, shows the line of men at CECOT with a red circle around Abrego Garcia.
On March 31, US officials admitted Abrego Garcia should not have been deported, calling it an “administrative error.” This is important. They know they made a mistake, and that he was here legally. They have said it was a mistake again and again and again, in court filings and verbally in court.
On April 4, District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to correct their mistake and bring Abrego Garcia back to the US from CECOTE by midnight on April 7. (This kind of ruling is often made in other cases in which people are falsely deported.) Judge Xinis literally said the Trump administration had to “facilitate and effectuate” his release—these words will also be important.
That same day, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals did not block Xinis’s order—meaning, they agreed the Trump administration had to get Abrego Garcia home. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court.
On April 7, SCOTUS paused Xinis’s order to have Abrego Garcia home by midnight that day, basically saying: give us a minute to decide the case.
On April 10, SCOTUS ruled unanimously that the president must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia, but they took issue with the word “effectuate.” The Hill has an excellent analysis of what SCOTUS said and how the Trump administration is changing the story:
“Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily stayed the order, which the full court later upheld to the extent, in the court’s words, that it ‘properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.’
“The kicker is this caveat: ‘The intended scope of the term “effectuate”…is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.’
“According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, to ‘facilitate’ is to ‘help bring something about,’ whereas to ‘effectuate’ is to ‘cause or bring about’ something. In other words, it’s the difference between trying and doing.
“The Supreme Court told Trump to try to get El Salvador to release Abrego Garcia back to U.S. custody, but made clear that Trump doesn’t actually have to if he doesn’t want to, so long as he cites ‘foreign affairs’ as an excuse.”
On April 14, Trump, President Nayib Bukele, Stephen Miller, and others spoke at the White House and made clear that they have no plans to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States. Pam Bondi said, “If [El Salvador officials] want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane. That’s up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us.” Stephen Miller went further, going against repeated Department of Justice legal filings (all of which are on record), by saying, “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador.”
Notice how they say they cannot bring him home (this is untrue; this is not an unusual ruling in the instance of mistaken deportation). But also, notice how the story has changed within two weeks: on March 31, the Department of Justice readily admitted in legal filings that they mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia; by April 14, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller reversed course and lied, saying Abrego Garcia was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador.
Changing the story to cover up something illegal: This is not the first time this has happened in US history. I wrote a whole book about it.
This past weekend, I talked about We Were Illegal: Uncovering a Texas Family’s Mythmaking and Migration at the San Antonio Book Festival, in a panel with Tim Z. Hernandez, moderated by the literary legend, Carmen Tafolla. Tim wrote two exquisite books, All They Will Call You (2017) and They Call You Back (2024) about the 1948 Los Gatos plane crash, where 28 migrant farmworkers died as they were being deported out of the US. They were buried in a mass grave, their identities almost completely unknown, until Tim did the painful, meticulous, compassionate work of finding the people and their families, whose stories were not told by our government at the time.
For my reading from We Were Illegal, I read from a section set in Revolutionary Era Virginia. I won’t give it all away, because it’s one of my favorite parts of the book, but I discovered early on in my research that one of my direct ancestors was one of the first 78 men to experience what was called “Lynch’s Law.”
In the illegal “trial” that took place in Virginia in the summer of 1780, Charles Lynch—a plantation owner and saltpeter mine manager—conducted mob-driven, outside-of-the-law examinations of suspected Loyalists. Think the old Mel Gibson movie, Patriot: these men in the Virginia militia uncovered a plot by their neighbors who were loyal to the British troops. Rather than wait for authorities, the militia men accused, tried, convicted, and punished the suspected traitors all at once.
Thomas Jefferson was the governor of Virginia at the time, and at first, he was angry with Lynch. He'd told Lynch to bring all of the accused men to Richmond to stand trial. But later, Jefferson wrote Lynch: “Your activity on this occasion, deserves great commendation.” In 1782, the Virginia government passed a law retroactively declaring Lynch’s illegal actions legal—because of the urgency of the times.
As I write in the book, Charles Lynch “broke the law, took matters into his own hands, and convicted people outside of the court. The legal system declared after the fact that extraordinary circumstances justified this violence and retribution—formally praising a type of vigilantism that would be repeated thousands and thousands of times throughout United States history.” At the time, it was called “Lynch’s law,” but later, “the vigilante, outside-of-the-law, trial-like mob tactics would be called simply ‘lynchings.’”
After our conversation, during the Q&A time, a man asked me (in a question designed to be disingenuous), what we were supposed to do when times were so urgent, when there was a “flood of immigrants taking over our cities” and “kids were being made to be uncomfortable in school.” I answered (I hope) kindly but firmly that I couldn’t agree with his starting premise, because the narrative he’d been sold about what was actually happening wasn’t true. There aren’t cities being overrun by violent illegal immigrants, despite the myths and rumors circulating online and in certain corners of the news. (This overview of what happened in Aurora, Colorado is an excellent example.) And learning the truth about our past isn’t about making people uncomfortable (though that’s OK too!), it’s about not repeating the mistakes of the past and not covering up the truth for next generations.
But his question proved the exact point I was trying to make. Notice the pattern of the narrative shift: Things are so urgent, we have no choice but to act—things are chaotic, lawless, out of control. There’s a threat that must be eradicated now, today, we cannot wait. Later, we’ll change the story or change the law, and justify what we did.
This has happened so many times in US history, I can’t name them all, though every lynching would count. We’ve already called what’s happening in the US trafficking and kidnapping in this newsletter: Abrego Garcia’s case is very close to (if not fully already at) a federal lynching—a man is removed illegally and punished mistakenly outside of the law. Lynchings do not always mean deaths, though detention in CERCOT could very well be a death sentence for him.
One part of this pattern we’re also seeing is how the victim is accused of being the perpetrator of the crime—that’s part of the story change. I noticed that happening in 2015 and 2016, as the country began illegally turning away legal refugees and asylum-seekers, who had long enjoyed bipartisan support in the US. Politicians started associating the victims of terror with the terrorists. This is not a partisan criticism: both parties did this, to some measure, though Trump was always much more blatant about it. That’s how Trump’s administration was able to so quickly destroy refugee resettlement, once one of the most stable, well-respected federal programs in US history. (I wrote a book about US refugee resettlement too.)
Abrego Garcia is just the latest victim of this story change: the government has accused him of being associated with the gang MS-13, but not produced any evidence to support that claim. Instead, as his lawyers have argued on multiple occasions, Abrego Garcia is himself in danger in returning to El Salvador because of proven, verifiable threats to him by the Barrio 18 gang. Those threats are why, according to NPR, the court “granted him a withholding of removal, which barred the U.S. government from deporting him to El Salvador specifically.”
Again: he’s a victim of gang violence, not the perpetrator. The irony is horrific and cruel.
This pattern is part of both the rise of authoritarianism in our country, and the constitutional crisis that many people are claiming it is.
And also, false urgency / illegal action / story change is a very, very American move.
We’ve been reporting on individual instances of injustice in this newsletter, but also patterns, and this week, this pattern has me especially concerned: the Trump administration is clearly establishing the practice of quickly deporting legal residents, and presumably citizens (see Trump’s remarks about “homegrown” deportees to Bukele). If SCOTUS or Congress don’t stop them, they will blatantly continue to illegally deport people without due process, and then say there’s nothing they can do because it’s now in foreign hands.
And they’re paving the road for something bigger: Well-founded rumors suggest that something is coming on or around April 20. That is the end of the 90-day deadline he set out in a January 20 executive order to the secretaries of defense and homeland security to send him a report chronicling “the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.”
We’ll be watching to see if they continue the pattern of false urgency (to justify invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and deploy military in the US) / illegal action (God help us all) / story change (who knows what they’ll say to cover it up). Abrego Garcia is one of dozens of people whose lives are at stake right now. Soon, it might very well be all of us.
But—and this is the thing that gives me enormous hope, still, in the midst of all of this—there are many, many, many of us who are appalled and who are speaking up. It’s imperative right now that those of us who are citizens, and who are not at risk of deportation, call our representatives now. Immediately. And that we continue to be as loud as we can about be what is happening.
One group whose voices have been the loudest are the fierce SMART Transportation Division union, of which Abrego Garcia is a member, who are standing in “unwavering solidarity” with their brother. After the SCOTUS decision, they released a statement: “Our call is unchanged, and it is now backed by the Supreme Court: The government must bring Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia home and grant him due process. We are overjoyed for Kilmar and his family, and we look forward to the Trump administration taking immediate steps to bring him back to the U.S.”
People from all over the country, and all over the world, are standing in unwavering solidarity with them—not just for Abrego Garcia, but everyone who is being detained and deported without due process.
Yes, this is very scary, and yes, it’s illegal. But also, this is not the first time, nor will it be the last; this pattern has happened in our country, which means, we can turn this around. Since I started writing this article, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have already filed a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration. Judge Xinis has called for a follow-up hearing today, Tuesday, April 15, at 4pm EST. This case has national attention, but this pattern—false urgency / illegal action / story change— will be repeated again and again and again unless we demand that it be stopped.
The government sent ten more detainees to El Salvador on Saturday. More deportations are being planned right now.
We have turned this particular tide in our country before. The question in front of all of us: what will do today, now, in our time, to fight this illegal injustice before it’s too late? That’s the only way we’ll really change the story.