Justices Side With a Wrongly Deported Migrant, but His Return is Uncertain

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After an exasperating week reading the news it’s a relief to see the front page with a headline in a regular-sized font again. Sure, the markets plummeted again yesterday as investors realized we’ve replaced a trade war with everyone on the planet with a trade war with… the biggest nastiest rival nation on the planet, but at least there’s room to consider other areas of the administration’s inadequacy. Not just its suicidal trade policy which, by the way, “will deal a particularly hard economic blow to agricultural workers in many red states, hitting many of the voters who helped Mr. Trump win the presidential election.”

Still, the lead story on the left of the paper is about how the Supreme Court on Thursday instructed the government to take steps to return a Salvadoran migrant it had wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. 

Adam Liptak reports that the Supreme Court required the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return” of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Which is easy for you to say. And also for the Supreme Court. But it turns out not so easy to actually…effectuate.

Because once you’ve deported someone to El Salvador it turns out you don’t have legal jurisdiction there. The court can’t force the country to send him back because “they were not sure if courts had that power.”

It’s a bit like my mom ordering me to “facilitate and effectuate” the chucking out of my jeans with the holes in the knees when I was in my grunge era. In the end she just exceeded her judicial authority. 

The court ordered the administration to handle the case now as if Mr. Garcia “had not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” 

But of course, there’s the rub, as Shakespeare wrote. A lower court said the administration had committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience by sending Mr. Garcia to El Salvador despite a 2019 ruling from an immigration judge granting him a special status, finding that he might face violence or torture if sent to El Salvador.

The government claims Mr. Garcia is a member of a violent street gang but the judge said those claims are based on a “singular unsubstantiated allegation.” 

Still, who needs proof when you’re sending a brown guy to get tortured in a foreign country, eh?

Mr. Garcia’s lawyers said he “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafkaesque mistake.”

Kafka. My old boss Mark, a brilliant photographer and writer and painter, once wrote a bestselling book called “Kafka’s Soup,” adapting a dozen recipes in the style of famous writers. You should check it out. But that’s about the only mention of Kafka that I find encouraging, particularly when it’s referring to an item in the news.

The bottom line is that if anyone is turning into cockroaches around here, it’s the U.S. government.

Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to!

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.

Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”