from the seems-backwards dept
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They’re literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they’re doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups.
Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ordered his release, noting that the Justice Department appeared to have leaned on actual criminals to fabricate evidence against him. Now the Washington Post has the full story, and it’s even more damning: The Trump admin is literally freeing a repeat violent offender in exchange for testimony against Abrego—a man with no criminal history who was working and raising a family.
The Trump administration has agreed to release from prison a three-time felon who drunkenly fired shots in a Texas community and spare him from deportation in exchange for his cooperation in the federal prosecution of Kilmar Abrego García, according to a review of court records and official testimony.
Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, has been convicted of smuggling migrants and illegally reentering the United States after having been deported. He also pleaded guilty to “deadly conduct” in the Texas incident, and is now the government’s star witness in its case against Abrego.
Let that sink in: They’re freeing someone, who drunkenly fired shots in a community, to help them prosecute someone whose only “crime” was being the victim of the government’s own illegal deportation, making the Trump administration look totally incompetent in the process.
Remember, the Trump regime insisted that it was focused on going after the worst of the worst, the most hardened criminals of all. Yet, over and over again we’re finding out that they can’t actually find all those criminals they insisted were out there, so they’re randomly grabbing anyone they can find. In the case of Abrego, that meant taking a man who had no criminal history, and appeared to be gainfully employed, and raising a family, and shipping him to the one place an immigration court had forbidden the US to send him.
That set the DOJ off on a wild goose chase to try to justify their own massive fuckup, leading to these questionable criminal charges against him, which they used to try to distract from the fact that they accidentally sent a man to a foreign concentration camp after being forbidden from doing so.
But to make that work, apparently it involves freeing the actual hardened, dangerous criminal, in hopes that he’ll testify against Abrego.
Hernandez is among a handful of cooperating witnesses who could help the Trump administration achieve its goal of never letting Abrego walk free in the United States again. In exchange, he has already been released early from federal prison to a halfway house and has been given permission to stay in the U.S. for at least a year.
“Otherwise he would be deported,” Peter Joseph, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, testified at Abrego’s criminal hearing June 13. The government is also likely to give him a work permit, the agent told the court.
There’s no way to look at this other than “we’ll release a hardened criminal who is here illegally, and who has already been deported multiple times, including letting him stay in the US with working apers, so long as he concocts a story that lets DHS and the DOJ save face after we fucked up royally in renditioning a man illegally.”
That should be an embarrassment to the Trump regime, but it will barely get any attention.
It Gets Worse: Trump Is Also Freeing MS-13 Leaders
But the Abrego case isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a pattern. At the same time Trump is manufacturing criminal cases against innocent people, he’s also cutting deals to free actual MS-13 gang leaders.
The NY Times has reported that for all of Trump’s promises to destroy the MS-13 gang, he’s cut a deal with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele to let actual top MS-13 gang leaders go free:
Even among the brutal ranks of the transnational gang called MS-13, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez stands out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say.
Known as “Vampiro,” he has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in Mexico, rivals in El Salvador and his own compatriots in the United States.
His arrest in February 2023 was a major triumph for American investigators, who only months earlier had accused him and 12 other gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed and corruption in a wide-ranging federal indictment on Long Island.
But this April, the prosecutors who brought those charges suddenly — and quietly — asked a federal judge to drop them. Citing “national security concerns,” they said they needed to return Mr. Arévalo to El Salvador, his homeland.
The report details how these actual MS-13 leaders have evidence of Bukele’s corruption, and Bukele asked for them back, rather than letting them tell their stories to American courts:
But the Trump administration has not acknowledged another reason Mr. Bukele would want them back: U.S. prosecutors have amassed substantial evidence of a corrupt pact between the Salvadoran government and some high-ranking MS-13 leaders, who they say agreed to drive down violence and bolster Mr. Bukele politically in exchange for cash and perks in jail, a New York Times investigation found.
The deal with El Salvador heralded by Mr. Trump as a crackdown on crime is actually undermining a longstanding U.S. inquiry into the gang, according to multiple people with knowledge of the initiative. Two major ongoing cases against some of the gang’s highest-ranking leaders could be badly damaged, and other defendants could be less likely to cooperate or testify in court, they said.
The Pattern Is Clear
So let’s be clear about what’s happening here:
- Innocent people like Abrego: Prosecuted with manufactured evidence from criminals who get released in exchange for their testimony
- Actual violent criminals: Released early from prison and given work permits if they’ll help prosecute innocent people
- MS-13 gang leaders: Handed over to a foreign dictator to protect that dictator from corruption charges, undermining ongoing DOJ investigations
This isn’t “tough on crime”—it’s the opposite. It’s law enforcement theater that makes everyone less safe while covering up the administration’s own legal violations.
All that seems really bad! It’s almost as if the Trump regime is much more focused on public relations claims than actually helping to stop gang activity.
Meanwhile, the judge in his criminal case has agreed that even though they’ve ruled that he should be released, Abrego is probably safer in federal prison, because were he released, ICE would likely ship him halfway around the world to some dangerous war zone.
Think about that: A federal judge is keeping someone in prison not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re safer there than in the hands of immigration enforcement. That’s where we are now—federal prison as sanctuary from ICE’s lawlessness.
This is what happens when immigration enforcement becomes completely divorced from actual public safety and becomes, instead, a machine for generating propaganda victories, no matter how many innocent people get ground up in the process.
Filed Under: abrego garcia, criminals, deportations, ice, kilmar abrego garcia, ms-13
