Render Unto Caesar, Deport Unto CECOT
When a government can ignore its own courts, vanish a man it once protected, and silence the witness before the crime is named—what, precisely, remains of the republic?
Illustration by Donny Evans
What does it say about a government when it willfully defies its own Supreme Court to keep an innocent man imprisoned abroad?
It says the mask has slipped.
On March 15, 2025, Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a Salvadoran national lawfully residing in Maryland with his U.S. citizen wife and children—was seized without cause, hurled through the machinery of immigration enforcement, and illegally deported to El Salvador. This, despite a standing federal court order granting him “withholding of removal” status which was issued in 2019 after credible threats from Salvadoran gangs that made his deportation unlawful.
The Trump administration later characterized this act—this unlawful expulsion in direct defiance of a federal ruling—as an “administrative error.” A phrase that now joins the bloodless lexicon of state cruelty, alongside “enhanced interrogation” and “collateral damage.” It wasn’t an error. It was an abduction by a government that no longer recognizes legal limits.
Once exiled, Abrego Garcia was delivered into the maw of CECOT, El Salvador’s most notorious prison complex—a brutalist monument to mass incarceration where transparency goes to die. There, he has remained without charge, trial, or visit, up until yesterday when Senator Chris Van Hollen met with him.
When the matter reached the highest court in the land, the U.S. Supreme Court—which, in this era of scorched-earth jurisprudence, can barely agree on the color of the sky—it spoke with one voice. All nine justices united to say, in effect: ‘Return the man you illegally exiled.’ And the Trump administration, in a display of imperial insolence, replied with silence. One imagines them filing the decision alongside their copies of the Constitution: unread and unopened.
In a press briefing as bloodless as the policy it defended, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt attempted to split the difference between obedience and defiance. “The Supreme Court made their ruling last night very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to facilitate the return, not to effectuate the return,” she told reporters. One could almost hear the ghost of Pontius Pilate washing his hands in the West Wing. Facilitate, not effectuate. Assist, not act. It is the language of plausible deniability—of a government that pretends to obey while ensuring nothing happens at all.
Federal Judge Paula Xinis, overseeing compliance, has accused the administration of doing “nothing.” She has mandated daily progress updates, as if babysitting a willfully negligent defendant. At this rate, Garcia might return sometime between the Rapture and the release of Trump’s tax returns.
And so we arrive at the only question that matters: