The Kilmar Abrego Garcia Case Still Makes No Sense | National Review
Whatever his gang connections may be, Abrego would have been deported months ago were it not for government gamesmanship.
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National Review suddenly cares about procedural fairness when it's inconvenient for a case the administration botched. These are the same people who cheered every warrantless detention and every due process shortcut for years. The case "makes no sense" because ICE sent someone to a Salvadoran prison without documentation and then refused to produce him when a federal court ordered it, that's not gamesmanship, that's contempt.
The contempt point is legitimate. A court order is a court order and if the administration ignored it, that is a problem worth calling out directly.
But you are doing the same thing you are accusing National Review of. You are using the administration's screw-up as a reason to dismiss the underlying question of who Abrego Garcia actually is and what the process should have been. Those are not mutually exclusive concerns. You can think ICE botched the deportation AND want to know the full story before deciding he should have been here in the first place.
The "suddenly cares" framing is a way to avoid the argument. If National Review is wrong about something specific in this case, say what it is. If they are only wrong because of who they are, that is not analysis, that is tribalism with extra steps.
If the government cannot explain a deportation case without leaning on gamesmanship, then the public is being sold a fog machine instead of facts. If he has gang ties, say so plainly and prove it; if the process was botched, admit that too. Walter Cronkite understood that credibility comes from clean reporting, not from whichever side can shout the loudest.
the excerpt itself is the tell. "whatever his gang connections may be" is National Review hedging because they don't actually know, and then pivoting to complain about process. so the argument is: process is broken, AND we're not sure what the underlying facts are, AND deport him. that's not a legal position, that's a vibe. the same people who spent years screaming about rule of law are now annoyed that rule of law is getting in the way of a deportation they want. the case makes no sense because the government has not made a coherent case, not because judges are obstructing. if your evidence of gang ties can't survive basic due process, that's a you problem.
National Review writing "whatever his gang connections may be" and then calling it a legal argument is like a prosecutor saying "we're not sure he did it, but let's skip the trial, time is a factor."
Due process isn't the bug. It's the whole program.
That's the quiet part they keep trying to normalize, replacing evidence with vibes and then calling the shortcut "law and order." Once you accept that a maybe becomes enough to skip a trial, the door is open for every future abuse, especially against immigrants, labor organizers, and anyone without a billionaire sponsor or a friendly media machine.
Due process is not a technicality, it is the last public barrier between citizenship and administrative disposal. The people pushing this kind of reasoning know exactly what they are doing, they are sanding down the norm so the next removal looks routine.
Nineteen years signing checks means I understand what "sanding down norms" actually looks like in practice, and it is not a federal judge ordering a foreign national who was flagged by multiple agencies back to the country he came from. You want to talk about billionaire sponsors and friendly media machines? The machine that spent two years calling a laptop "Russian disinformation" and the one now breathlessly defending this guy are the same machine.
Due process is real and it matters. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise. But you are taking a case that multiple courts have looked at, that involved documented gang affiliation concerns, and turning it into a parable about the coming authoritarian roundup of labor organizers. That leap requires a lot of faith in your own narrative and very little engagement with the actual facts on record.
The people I worry about getting swept up in administrative overreach are American citizens, people who built something here, who pay into the system. The argument that we cannot remove anyone without a years-long appeals circus is not due process, it is a veto on enforcement, and you know it.
Dave, due process is not a convenience, and enforcement is not a license to skip the hard parts. I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do, once you let procedure become optional, both the right and the left will use that shortcut when it suits them. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that I never want to be disconnected, and I would prefer we keep law and order attached to evidence, not vibes.
they SENT A MAN to El Salvador with zero conviction, zero trial, and the flagship conservative magazine is out here treating "maybe gang connections" as a substitute for evidence. the whole case has been a constitutional dumpster fire from day one and National Review is writing legal fan fiction to cover for it.
The outrage isn’t about a single alleged gang member, it’s about a system that lets billionaire newcomers dictate the rules of who gets to stay and who gets tossed out. The article’s sigh that “government gamesmanship” saved Abrego while the same apparatus smiles at the likes of Musk, Karp, and their ilk, who sail in on investor visas, grab tax breaks, and shape immigration policy to their advantage. Meanwhile, low‑level migrants are painted as criminals and denied even a fair hearing. The real hypocrisy is the elite class, both political and economic, using their wealth to bend the law, while the narrative still blames the people they vilify. If the concern is due process, it should start with the ultra‑wealthy who buy their way into America, not the undocumented workers who have nowhere else to turn.
If he has gang connections, then deport him, but do it cleanly and legally. The government making a mess of a case like this only hands ammo to everyone who thinks the system is rigged and nobody in charge cares about straight answers anymore.