Last month, the Trump administration arrested a sheet metal apprentice in Baltimore named Kilmar Abrego Garcia and deported him back to El Salvador, where he’s currently languishing in a gulag. According to his wife, his three children keep asking when he’s coming home.

Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and an immigration judge ruled in 2019 that he could not be deported to El Salvador because of “credible” death threats. Despite this, Donald Trump and his sycophants insist the deportee is a member of the notorious MS-13 gang. Hence, Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador anyway. And instead of attempting to demonstrate this as part of anything we would recognize as due process, the administration’s line is, “Trust us, bro.”

That’s despite a court filing in which a lawyer for the Trump administration admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported “because of an administrative error.” But that lawyer has since been suspended because he seemingly failed to grasp the operating principle that undergirds all of this.

Trump’s flacks claim Abrego Garcia is a “terrorist” and, citing foreign policy prerogatives, said the executive branch has no obligation to follow a district court ruling that was upheld last week by the U.S. Supreme Court. And even if it did, they say, Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador and thus beyond the scope of U.S. jurisdiction.

This open defiance culminated in an obscene spectacle at the White House on Monday, where Trump hosted Abrego Garcia’s enslaver, Salvador President Nayib Bukele. Bukele said he won’t release the prisoner, who by the way, is one of more than 230 people – mostly Venezuelans – the U.S. shipped there without due process. (A 60 Minutes investigation found that at least 75% of them have no known criminal record.) For his part, Trump, who suggested he’d deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador, acted as though his hands are tied when everyone knows he could get Abrego Garcia back if he wanted to.

Why deny Abrego Garcia due process? Why ignore a court ruling ordering his return? Why insist he’s a terrorist? Why pretend that you, the president of the United States, are somehow powerless to request (i.e., demand) some client tinpot dictator release him?

Because the Trump administration’s position is that there is no such thing as a wrongly deported person. That Abrego Garcia is still rotting in a foreign prison – despite a government lawyer’s earlier admission that he was sent there by mistake – is what counts. He’s in prison and is ipso facto guilty. No hearing necessary. No opportunity to contest the government’s allegations whatsoever. Straight to jail by executive fiat. If the regime admits its error and secures Abrego Garcia’s return, it will have admitted that it’s fallible and will create hope for others who have been black-bagged and who will be black-bagged. And that, the regime can’t have.

Trump is like a person who tries to get out of jury duty by saying that because the defendant was arrested, they must be guilty. Except instead of being excused, Trump – who as it turns out was also the arresting officer – just became the jury and the judge.