Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project building, Seattle. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Remorse sleeps during prosperity but awakes bitter consciousness during adversity.

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions

Trump and Rubio would have deported Tom Paine for writing seditious pamphlets as a “citizen of the world” and not the US. As it was, Paine died a pariah in the country he did so much to liberate, condemned as a heretic and Jacobin. Only six people attended his funeral in New York City, and the great radical essayist William Cobbett felt compelled to sail over to the States, dig up his bones, and take them back to the UK because the US had betrayed Paine’s vision for the country and its own revolution.

If you wanted to know what the US was like under Jim Crow and the Red Scare, you’re getting a glimpse of it right now.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia came to the US in 2012 to escape being recruited into a Salvadoran gang that had terrorized his family for more than two years. In 2016, he met his future wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, a US citizen living in Maryland. They eventually moved in together and Kilmar helped raise her two children. They later had a child together. Each of the three kids had some form of disability. Kilmar, according to Jennifer, was an attentive and devoted father to all of the children. He held a steady job, he stayed out of trouble, and then he was busted in 2019 while waiting to apply for a job at Home Depot and accused of being a member of the M-13 gang in Long Island, where he’d never been. During his hearing, Abrega adamantly denied any gang ties. The cops said they arrested him because “he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique.”

Jennifer Vasquez Sura wrote in a deposition that she was so fearful Kilmar would be deported that she arranged for them to get married while he was in jail: “I coordinated with the detention center and a local pastor to officiate our wedding. We were separated by glass and were not allowed physical contact. The officers had to pass our rings to each other. It was heartbreaking not to be able to hug him.”

Relying on the bogus testimony from a confidential informant, the immigration judge issued a removal order but barred his deportation to El Salvador, agreeing that there was a serious threat to Abrego Garcia’s life if he was returned home. The judge ordered his release and required him to regularly check-ins with ICE, which Abrego Garcia faithfully did.

So things stood until March 12, 2025, when ICE agents stopped Abrego Garcia’s car as he was driving his 5-year-old son home from school. He was cuffed, told his immigration status had been revoked and that he would be deported. The agents took him to a detention center in Baltimore. When Kilmar was finally able to talk with Jennifer on the phone, he told her the ICE agents once again accused him of being a member of M-13, saying bizarrely they’d watched the family frequently visit a certain restaurant and that they had photos of Kilmar playing basketball.

On the morning of March 15, Kilmar called Jennifer again to let her know he’d been transferred to Louisiana. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different,” Jennifer wrote in her deposition. “He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT.'” Jennifer hasn’t heard from him since.

Then, on Monday of this week, the Trump administration admitted in a

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