Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit has put a spotlight on a handful of words and phrases that have become key points of contention in the closely watched and fast-moving dispute over his deportation.
The court and the Trump administration are at odds over the definition of “facilitate,” while other buzz terms in the case of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national and, to some, a “Maryland man,” have sparked debate.
Judge Paula Xinis introduced the most controversial terms into the case’s lexicon when she ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
An immigration judge in 2019 had issued an order that barred the government from deporting the Salvadoran immigrant, who is also an alleged MS-13 gang member, to El Salvador because of what the judge said was a credible concern that he could become the victim of gang members there.
That judge released him from custody that year and allowed him to continue living and working in Maryland so long as he checked in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement annually.
The Trump administration has admitted to disregarding the immigration judge’s order by deporting him to a Salvadoran megaprison but has said a recent Supreme Court order that modified Xinis’s directive meant it did not have to correct its error.
‘Facilitate,’ ‘effectuate,’ and ‘due regard’
The Supreme Court asked Xinis to “clarify” what she meant by her order, issued in response to Abrego Garcia’s family suing after the government abruptly arrested and deported him to a Salvadoran terrorist confinement center last month.
The high court agreed that the government must “facilitate” his return but criticized Xinis’s order to also “effectuate” it.
“The intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority,” the decision read.
The decision created ambiguity, as evidenced by Xinis rejecting the government’s position on the definition of “facilitate” this week.
A Department of Justice attorney argued during a hearing that it meant the Trump administration simply had to provide a plane for Abrego Garcia to return to the country if, and only if, the Salvadoran government chose to release him from the prison. Xinis disagreed.
“It flies in the face of the plain meaning of the word,” Xinis said.
In a subsequent order, the judge cited multiple dictionary definitions of the word “facilitate” and then expanded upon her view of the word’s meaning.
Trump administration officials “remain obligated, at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and resuming his status quo ante,” Xinis wrote. “But the record reflects that Defendants have done nothing at all.”
Complicating matters, the Supreme Court said that as Xinis moved forward with the case and worked with the government on facilitating Abrego Garcia’s return, she needed to do so “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”
Conservative attorney Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, wrote that that phrase was a “semantic distraction.”
The high court “was clearly saying that Xinis should simply adopt [4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals] Judge Wilkinson’s modification of substituting ‘facilitate’ for ‘effectuate,’” he said.
Bukele won’t ‘smuggle’ him into the country
The DOJ told Xinis that President Nayib Bukele had the sole say over whether to release Abrego Garcia to the United States. The DOJ pointed out that Bukele is disinterested in releasing him based on a response he gave a reporter in the Oval Office this week when asked if he planned to “return him.”
“The question’s preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States?” Bukele replied, adding, “We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit claims that he is not affiliated with MS-13, and his lawyer has said he has no criminal convictions or charges on his record. A batch of court documents shared by the government on Wednesday shows that when he was briefly detained in 2019, he was arrested while in the company of at least one MS-13 gang member with a criminal history. An immigration judge in 2019 found that Abrego Garcia was affiliated with the MS-13 gang based on evidence provided by DHS, and that judge’s finding was later upheld on administrative appeal.
A DOJ attorney told the judge this week that the prospect of returning Abrego Garcia was “raised at the highest possible levels” in reference to Bukele’s remarks at the White House.
But Xinis batted down that argument, saying a “reporter asked a question” and that she needed to see action from the government.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an attorney with the American Immigration Council, said on X that Bukele’s comments were “preposterous.”
“No one needs to ‘smuggle’ anyone, the US could just parole him in as they do routinely,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
Did he enter the country ‘illegally’?
One observer who works at an investigative nonprofit group pointed out that Abrego Garcia did not enter the country “illegally” because “children are never tried under that law, and Abrego was 16 when he crossed.”
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, meanwhile, said in court filings that his client entered the country “undetected.”
A longtime immigration attorney for Republicans told the Washington Examiner that word choice should not blur the manner in which he crossed the border.
“Children enter illegally all the time,” the attorney said, pointing to the Department of Homeland Security’s record from 2019 in which a deportation officer described Abrego Garcia as “entering illegally” into Texas in 2012.
‘Maryland man’
Perhaps the most heated language dispute featured in Abrego Garcia’s case has come over the words that news outlets have used to describe him.
Abrego Garcia was presented first in a sympathetic Atlantic headline as a “Maryland father,” but the government’s frenetic release of negative information about him over the last month has increasingly led Republicans to criticize associating him with Maryland, where his defense team says he has lived since he arrived in the country.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a history of violence and was not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as,” the DHS wrote in a statement, accompanied by a police report showing his wife once reported that he hit her.
A vast array of news outlets have described him as a “Maryland man.” The long-used style convention involves referring to a person by a place they have lived for a substantial period, regardless of their immigration status. Still, Republicans have blasted the practice in this case.
“He’s not a Maryland man,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox News this week.
JUDGE TO ALLOW DEPOSITIONS FROM FOUR TRUMP OFFICIALS OVER ABREGO GARCIA DEPORTATION
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, wrote on X, “Not. A. Maryland. Man. An illegal alien MS-13 terrorist from El Salvador.”
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr went so far as to suggest that calling the Salvadoran national a “Maryland man” was “news distortion,” singling out Comcast-owned outlets in his purview.
Casey Mattox, a lawyer who has worked at numerous conservative think tanks, said he believed people describing Abrego Garcia as a “Maryland man” were unsuccessfully “trying to appeal to [his] emotions.”
