In retrospect, maybe one of the first signs the Trump administration knew they were losing was when they tried to pin even more crimes on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man removed from the United States in “error,” they admitted, and jailed in a notorious Salvadoran prison. In mid-March, shortly after Abrego Garcia was first stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers while driving with his young son, the Trump administration accused him of being a gang member, arguing that this was grounds to remove him from the U.S. On March 31, an official with ICE admitted in a sworn statement that putting Abrego Garcia on a plane to be caged in the so-called Center for Terrorism Confinement in El Salvador was an “administrative error.” But then, last week, after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt doubled down, not only insisting that Abrego Garcia was “a foreign terrorist and an MS-13 gang member” but even accusing him of “human trafficking”—a wild new claim.
As with many of the cases of immigrants rounded up by Trump’s team so far, there’s no credible evidence for this accusation against Abrego Garcia. What the evidence does suggest, however, is that the Trump administration is trapped in a corrupt cycle, trying to suppress the public’s outrage at its lies with yet more lies. But the opposition has taken notice: The lies aren’t working, and that could be turned to their advantage.
The day after Leavitt’s vile accusation in the White House press room, the Department of Homeland Security issued an elaborate press release purporting to provide records of Abrego Garcia’s wrongdoing, writing that “intelligence reports found that he was involved in human trafficking.” The basis for this report, apparently first generated on April 17, was a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022, after which Abrego Garcia was sent on his way with a verbal warning about his expired license. No suspected trafficking was reported by the state trooper on the scene. DHS called this a “bombshell” report. “The facts speak for themselves, and they reek of human trafficking,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said of the report. Abrego Garcia’s wife said he was likely just driving people to construction sites for work, as he often had. This is extremely thin stuff for a trafficking accusation.
So why did the administration suddenly layer on a new allegation? It’s part of a broader escalation. Around the same time, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox, “Every liberal journalist who has called him a ‘Maryland man’ and saying he was rightfully in this country should be apologizing tonight to President Trump.” Trump posted a very badly doctored photo on Truth Social on April 18, which he claimed showed that Abrego Garcia had “MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles.” On Monday, Leavitt said, “Shame” on Democrats who spoke out about Abrego Garcia’s case, “who wasted Easter Sunday going on every television show in the country to advocate for the return of an illegal criminal gang member.”
Meanwhile, the administration’s case against Abrego Garcia is falling apart. Many have argued convincingly that the government’s claims here rest on little more than some questionable secondhand statements from an unidentified informant after a single police encounter in 2019, outside a Home Depot where he was looking for work for the day. These statements were apparently not strong enough for the government to use them in their earlier case for deporting Abrego Garcia in 2019. But the informant’s statements were used to fight his request for bond in the same case.
The purpose of these “bombshell” reports, uncovered years after the fact, is not to shore up a case made in the court of law. As DHS Assistant Secretary McLaughlin said, on release of the traffic stop “report” on April 18, “The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal gang member has completely fallen apart.” Their aim is to shame the media, as Leavitt put it, or to at least make the media second-guess their reporting.
But by the time the administration turned to the outrageous trafficking allegation, momentum was solidly on the side of their opponents. Maryland Senator Van Hollen’s meeting in El Salvador with Abrego Garcia came just a few hours after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a “blistering” order against Trump and Abrego Garcia’s removal. All of that was backed up by public protests across the country, by Abrego Garcia’s union siblings and leadership standing up for him, by people challenging the Republican lawmakers who represent them. “Are you gonna bring that guy back from El Salvador?” a man in an American flag ball cap asked Senator Chuck Grassley in Iowa last week, to applause from others in the audience. “The Supreme Court said to bring him back.” It had, days earlier, and when Trump defied its order, he probably just pushed more people into the streets.
The Trump administration, when faced with this consistent pushback, from lawmakers, the courts, the public—and from Abrego Garcia’s community—has merely doubled down on its lies—further fueling the backlash. It’s not a surprise; these are the same people who ran on lies about immigrants from Haiti preying on pets and eating them, and won.
At this point, whatever is coming from the White House or from Homeland Security must be understood in this light: as a volley in a propaganda war, meant to get people to withdraw their public objections to Trump’s mass-deportation regime, to get people to stop talking about the administration’s abuse of what remains of a justice system, and to keep people from seeing they are the ones who give that system power. People can see the human cost of the administration’s lies every time Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s story is in the news. Trump may have put him there first, but he and his people seem utterly unprepared to have had to answer for that every day since. That’s the cost of their scapegoating: They underestimated how many people would refuse to go along. Every day they have to hear demands to bring Abrego Garcia home makes their lies about him less powerful.
