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Home – Illegal Alien Crime News – Justice Department Files Appeal Against ‘Maryland Man’

Justice Department Files Appeal Against ‘Maryland Man’

Remember “Maryland man”?

That was the tidy, media-friendly label attached to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national whom Democrats and their allies in the press made the face of what they called the Trump administration’s lawless and vindictive immigration enforcement program.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., even traveled to El Salvador to visit him in prison, turning Abrego Garcia into a symbol of supposed executive cruelty.

But courtrooms have a way of stripping away slogans. And according to the federal government’s new filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, the “Maryland man” narrative may have omitted the most important part of the story: that Abrego was not merely an illegal alien caught up in a bureaucratic mistake, but a man the government now alleges was involved in human smuggling for money.

If the facts in the government’s brief are as strong as the government says they are, the Sixth Circuit should make short work of the district court’s dismissal of the indictment.

More importantly, the case should remind Americans of something too often forgotten in immigration melodramas: enforcing the law is not vindictive. It is the government’s first duty.

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At issue is a doctrine called vindictive prosecution.

The phrase sounds ominous, as it should. No prosecutor may punish a defendant merely for exercising legal rights. But the doctrine is narrow for a reason. The Supreme Court has warned that a broad presumption of vindictiveness can block legitimate responses to criminal conduct and improperly drag courts into the constitutionally assigned discretion of the Executive Branch.

That is precisely what the district court appears to have done. It dismissed Abrego’s indictment not because he was innocent, and not because the assigned prosecutor acted in bad faith, but because the timing of the prosecution followed Abrego’s successful litigation challenging his removal to El Salvador.

Timing can matter. But timing is not a substitute for proof.

The government’s argument is straightforward.

A presumption of vindictiveness is appropriate only when the decisionmaker had a personal stake in the defendant’s exercise of a legal right and acted objectively unreasonably. Here, the prosecutor who sought........

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