President Donald Trump’s ICE Age has created a glacial array of unintended immigration and customs enforcement consequences. And there may be far more beneath the surface that we haven’t yet discovered.

For example, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, his wife and three children with special needs weren’t the only individuals who suffered when the Salvador-born Maryland resident was denied the constitutional due process right to confront his accuser in court.

Instead, he was whisked to the most notorious gulag in El Salvador – the one country U.S. officials were judicially forbidden to send him. A judge in 2019 feared Abrego Garcia would be harmed by El Salvador’s Barrio 18 gang that had been extorting money from his family and then tried to force him to join the gang. In 2012, he fled the gang and illegally entered the United States. He recently began a job as a sheet metal apprentice, joined a union and began a University of Maryland course, before he was snatched on March 12 and rush-deported to El Salvador.

You have been reading and seeing a lot about Abrego Garcia recently. You have heard Trump call Abrego Garcia a “foreign terrorist” whose “record is unbelievably bad.” And you have heard his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, read a carefully prepared statement: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien MS-13 gang member and foreign terrorist… Two separate judges found that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.”

Well, that’s not quite right, as you’ll soon see. But to tell you the truth, the president and his top team really don’t know what they’re talking about. In their defense, there’s a lot that just about everyone who speaks about this case doesn’t know and cannot know. Because the prime sources have never been asked in a court of law just what they know and how they know it. That chance was lost – to Trump and his team, to you and all of us – when Abrego Garcia was denied his due process chance to ask his accusers to verify their claim that he is an MS-13 gang member.

Abrego Garcia has denied being a member of MS-13 or any street gang and was never arrested and charged with any criminal offense in the United States or El Salvador. In a U.S. district court filing last month, his attorney wrote: “Although he has been accused of general ‘gang affiliation,’ the U.S. government has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation.”

We are left with this truth detector reality: The entire claim about Abrego Garcia being a member of the notorious MS-13 comes down to the word of one unnamed police informant whose contact was a detective in Washington’s suburban Hyattsville, Maryland. Abrego Garcia was picked up there in 2019, where he was described as loitering with three MS-13 members.

That informant’s Hyattsville police detective contact can’t be independently questioned for your edification because the detective has been suspended for reasons the police haven’t explained. Indeed, his name is blacked out in the local police document – called the “Gang Field Interview Sheet” (GFIS) – and that is the only bit of evidence about all this.

That GFIS said the confidential source described Abrego Garcia as “an active member of MS-13 with the Western clique… with the rank of ‘Chequeo.’" But Steven Dudley, who wrote a highly regarded book entitled “MS-13” has said that “Chequeo” isn’t a gang rank at all, but is the MS-13 term for recruits who haven’t been initiated. Also, the “Western clique” refers to an MS-13 unit that is based in Brentwood, on New York’s Long Island. Abrego Garcia has never lived there, according to his attorney. In the GFIS document, the no-name detective explained that Abrego Garcia was arrested with three men who were known MS-13 members – and was assumed to be a member of the gang because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls cap and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears, and mouth of presidents. All that “represents… they are a member in good standing with the MS-13,” the GFIS explained.

So we wonder: Can we believe an anonymous informant’s word, as relayed to us by a name-deleted suspended detective? I don’t know. You don’t know. Trump doesn’t know. Leavitt doesn’t know.

But the unintended consequences of Abrego Garcia being denied due process of law – so he could be jet-rushed to El Salvador’s notorious gulag – has reached all the way up to the Oval Office. And out into your living room.

We have all been denied the right to a due process that would help us decide for ourselves whether our 47th president has gone too far, yet again.

_____

_____

©2025 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.