Posted this last night on Facebook re: Kilmar Abrego Garca

[markpkessinger]

There will likely be some ruptured family relationships over my post, but I don't care anymore. I needed to say this!

Several times over the past week, I have sat down to write a post about Kilmar Abrego García, but each time I found even trying to write about it to be so disturbing and upsetting that I had to abandon the effort. But it is far too important an issue to let pass without saying something.

Of all the things Trump has done, the deportation, with no due process, of Mr. Abrego García to a brutal prison in El Salvador, from which, it is said, there is virtually no hope of ever being released, despite a Federal judge's order prohibiting the government from deporting him to that country, and despite the fact that the man has never been accused of a crime in either the U.S. or El Salvador, and Trump's outright refusal to lift a finger to facilitate his return, despite a UNANIMOUS Supreme Court ruling ordering the administration to do just that, is so far beyond the pale both legally and morally as to beggar belief!

It is something straight out of the USSR under Stalin, or out of 1930s Germany. It is monstrous . A lawyer for the Trump administration admitted that the man's deportation was "a mistake," and that there was no basis for deporting him. (And for telling the truth in Court, said lawyer was promptly fired by Pam Bondi.)

And just as disturbing as Trump's actions have been the reactions by many Trump supporters. One, commenting in the New York Times, wrote: "I don't see the problem; the man was here illegally, and now he's back in El Salvador where he belongs." Look, yes, Mr. Abrego García initially entered the country illegally. But he soon thereafter commenced an application for asylum. That case has not yet been finally adjudicated, but a federal judge found his claim to be credible enough to issue the order that should have protected him. Once that order had been issued, Mr. Abrego García's legal status changed, and from that point forward he had every right to be here. Full stop.

And even if you believe that he should have been denied legal status, the idea that a man who was fleeing violence in his country of origin, and entered the country illegally, committed such a grave crime as to be deserving of life imprisonment in one of the most brutal prisons in the world . . . that is just about the sickest, cruelest, most inhumane and inhuman response imaginable.

Not to mention that the right to due process is one of the foundational rights for which this country fought a revolution.

How could anyone, knowing he had perpetrated such an injustice against someone, be unwilling to do everything in his power to correct it? The fact that Trump is so unwilling to even try makes me wonder, horrible though it is to contemplate, if Mr. Abrego García is even still alive.

So I will say this to ANY Trump supporter in my orbit: if you can look at what has been done to Mr. Abrego García and still support Trump, or even if you can look at it and shrug with indifference, then I no longer know who you are. And if your humanity has become so constricted that you cannot see this for the utter moral outrage it is, I'm really not sure I want to know you at all!