No, that "Maryland father" did not have a legal right to stay in the USA (04-02-2025--Hour1)

[00:00:04] What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to 3 on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to thepetekalendershow.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support.

[00:00:28] I want to welcome to the show Will Chamberlain. Will is the senior counsel at the Article III Project, also with the Internet Accountability Project. Will, how are you, sir? Doing great, Pete. Good to be with you. Good. Thanks for making time for us. I appreciate it. First off, what is the Article III Project real quick? We're a legal and political advocacy organization. We work on behalf of, you know, the Trump administration, or not for them, but we work to push, you know, we were working to get Trump cabinet officials confirmed.

[00:00:55] We fight against, we fought against all the warfare against President Trump. We work to get judicial nominees confirmed. And we also file things like judicial ethics complaints in various places when judges violate their responsibilities. So, I wanted to have you on today to talk about Kilmer Armado Abrego Garcia, the, quote, Maryland father, as he is referred to in the Atlantic piece about him, because he got deported back to El Salvador.

[00:01:25] And this was the guy that was or wasn't, I don't know, in MS-13. So, first, let's kind of walk through, like, who was this or who is this guy? So, I mean, it's unclear whether he was MS-13. I think more likely than not, but there wasn't, you know, a full criminal trial on that question. I mean, the real simple thing that we know is he was an illegal alien who crossed into the United States in 2012. He was finally detained by ICE in 2019. He was going to be removed.

[00:01:54] And then he made this claim for asylum. And this claim for asylum, he claimed that somehow, like, you know, he was pushed out of the country or forced to leave because of threats to his mother's pupusa business in El Salvador. And eight years later, those threats were still so severe that he couldn't return. And he needed to make a claim like this because otherwise he was going to be forced to leave the country because he's an illegal alien who never fixed his legal status. But he obviously wanted a stake if he had, like, a, you know, a fiancé and a kid on the way.

[00:02:24] But even so, I mean, it's just, you know, one of the funny things is, you know, the story here is, like, this guy didn't get enough due process. It's like, if you actually understand what this guy's story is, it's clear that he got far too much due process, that he should have, you know, he's been able to stay in the country illegally for well over a decade. And he should go home. And now he is home. So the argument that his lawyer made was that he cannot go back to El Salvador because of an organization called the 18th Street Gang, which I'm pretty, I'm going to go out on a limb and say, I bet I know where to find these guys.

[00:02:55] But the 18th Street Gang was targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family's business, this pupusa business, which I was not aware how dangerous pupusa making, if that's what it is. I don't even know what, do you even know what a pupusa is? Yeah, it's like a Salvadoran, it's like a sandwich, not even a sandwich, like a stuffed tortilla with cheese. Oh, okay. Well, now I'm on board.

[00:03:19] No, so the family business, though, this was eight years ago that this gang was targeting his family. Is that a reason enough why he would be tortured or targeted by going home now? No, and in particular, it's because in the interim, I mean, Nayib Bukele has become the president of El Salvador and has crushed the gangs. I mean, the entire theory that this guy put forward, it was kind of ridiculous at the time.

[00:03:46] But even so, the theory was he's going to get persecuted and killed by this gang. Well, all the gang members are in jail now, so he can go home, right? El Salvador is now a safe country to return to. So, could the administration terminate the—because he asked for asylum, right? That's the deal. He had—he went in there and he asked for asylum. I guess, did he get it from immigration? He didn't. Okay. He didn't, because the rule is—which is a very sensible rule.

[00:04:13] If you don't apply for asylum within one year of crossing the border, you are barred from claiming asylum. What he got was this thing called a withholding of removal. And all that means is you are still a removable illegal alien. You just can't be removed to a specific country. You have to be removed somewhere else. And that's where the administration now admits that they messed up by sending him back to the country that was identified as the one that they shouldn't send him back to. Correct.

[00:04:42] But I think people need to understand the term harmless error, right? Because in reality, the circumstances that were the cause of this inability to remove him are gone, meaning this gang is no longer a threat to the guy. If the administration had just gone through the normal channels, went to the court, and said, hey, you need to withdraw this guy's withholding or removal because El Salvador is safe, they would have been able to remove him anyway. So, I mean, like, there's no injustice here is what I'm saying.

[00:05:10] I mean, there's a procedural due process flaw. But the outcome here, if the administration had followed due process, would have been exactly the same. This guy would have gone home. Let me go back to the MS-13 connection. And you wrote in a Twitter thread, I still call them that, the finding that he was a member of MS-13 only came up because he asked for bond. So why would it only come up? And then what happened? But why would it only come up when he asks for bond?

[00:05:40] And then what happened with the disposition of that? Well, so he got detained not because he was a member of MS-13, but because he was an illegal alien in the country illegally. So, I mean, that's sufficient to justify removal. You don't have, I mean, we're sort of in this weird space where the Democrats keep asking, well, what crime did they commit? It's like, well, they're in the country illegally. They don't have a right to be here. So that was the circumstance he was in. Now this guy was going to be detained until pending his removal. And he wanted to fight that. And so he asked for a bond.

[00:06:07] The bonds are usually not given in these cases, but you can ask for it. And so then the question is, okay, well, if we're going to be a bond, are you a danger to the community? And then that's where the question of this guy's MS-13 membership came up. And the judge found that there was evidence that he was a member of MS-13 and therefore that he could not establish that he was not a threat to the community. And so bond was denied. And then there was also the question of a flight risk, right? Yes, right.

[00:06:31] The fact, the idea that, you know, because this guy was likely to be removed and had failed to appear in regard to some of his traffic violations, the original immigration judge all the way back in 2019 said, yeah, we think that's another independent reason why we're going to deny your bond. So then that's when, I guess a little bit later, he shifts the arguments or his tactic in trying to stay, right? That's when he then tries the asylum claim? Exactly, right.

[00:06:58] He applied for this asylum and withholding of removal, lost an asylum, managed, but he did get his withholding of removal, managed to persuade the judge that his sob story about his mom's papusa business was true. And so that meant that he couldn't be removed to El Salvador. But, I mean, apparently there was just not no ability to get him removed somewhere else. And then moreover, the Biden administration didn't bother sort of challenging that withholding, you know, even once it was clear that El Salvador was now a safe country.

[00:07:24] Also, the papusa business, it's not even in business anymore, right? Yeah, it wasn't even in business back in 2019 when he was making this claim about fearing persecution. Well, all right. But aside from that, so then there is an argument, I read a piece over at the New Republic, and they say that he did have the legal right to be here, and he's not a convicted MS-13 gang member. What do you say to that? Well, the first part is false.

[00:07:54] He did not have the legal right to be here. He could have been removed instantly to any other country in the world. So that's just flat out false. The second claim is that he's not a convicted gang member. Yes, he was never prosecuted. There was no need to prosecute the guy. He was a detained illegal alien, right? We weren't thinking about trying to put him in an American prison for crimes he committed here. We were going to send him back to El Salvador because that's where he's a citizen of, and he never had got a legal right to be in the United States. Yeah. Will Chamberlain, he's the senior counsel at the Article III Project.

[00:08:24] You can follow him on Twitter, Will Chamberlain. And, Will, I appreciate the time, sir. Thanks so much. All right. Thanks for having me, Pete. All right. If you're listening to this show, you know I try to keep up with all sorts of current events. And I know you do, too. And you've probably heard me say, get your news from multiple sources. Why? Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which is why I've been so impressed with Ground News. It's an app, and it's a website, and it combines news from around the world in one place so you can compare coverage and verify information.

[00:08:54] You can check it out at check.ground.news slash Pete. I put the link in the podcast description, too. I started using Ground News a few months ago and more recently chose to work with them as an affiliate because it lets me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom. The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check.ground.news slash Pete.

[00:09:20] Subscribe through that link and you'll get 15% off any subscription. I use the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature. Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape more transparent. David Strom writing at HotAir.com about the Maryland father, who may or may not have been an MS-13 gang member,

[00:09:45] says the Trump administration has conceded that an administrative error resulted in a man being deported to El Salvador when he should not have been. Not that he should not have been deported, mind you, just as we heard from Will Chamberlain there. Not the basketball player. This guy's a lawyer. But as Will said, it's not that he shouldn't have been deported. He should have been. He was in the country illegally.

[00:10:12] He has been in the country illegally for more than a decade. He had plenty of opportunity to try to get himself right with the immigration rules and such. But he did not. And on the occasion when he was brought before an immigration judge, it did not go well for him. So it's not that he should not have been deported. The question is to which country.

[00:10:41] And the only thing that the man had won, Abrego Garcia or Garcia. Garcia. The only thing that Garcia had won was this, this limited holding that said, you can't send him back to El Salvador. There's a withholding. He was granted a withholding of removal to El Salvador. That's it.

[00:11:09] And so the administration sending him back to his home country of El Salvador. That was the incorrect thing to have done. Now, I think at this point, everybody knows my opinion of GovCo. I don't trust the government to do really much of anything well. Okay. And if it does perform adequately,

[00:11:37] that is usually sufficient for me to say, okay, I'm not going to die on that hill. I'm not going to, you know, I'm not going to make a big deal about it because you, you performed bare minimum adequate, you know? But even I understand, or maybe because of that, I understand that GovCo is not going to get everything right. Nobody does. No organization does. You can't. It is an impossibility.

[00:12:05] That's why the constitution allows for amendments, right? Because the founders recognize they're not going to get everything right. And if the document is to survive for the longterm, then you have to have the ability to correct mistakes that may be made unwittingly or wittingly. So, And so the government is going to make mistakes. They imprison people fall on, you know, uh, uh,

[00:12:33] with false charges or incorrect charges. They got the wrong guy. We have likely executed people in America. We have probably, I mean, the, the chances are like virtually a hundred percent that governments around this country have executed innocent people. Okay. That most assuredly has happened, which is also by the way, why I am opposed to the death penalty, because that like you, there's no coming back from that. You've deprived somebody of their life.

[00:13:01] You've murdered them and they didn't do the thing that you convicted them on. Right. But convictions are made in error. Um, right. People make mistakes. Government agencies make mistakes. That is not a reason to say that all of this needs to be unwound though, or that we can't deport anybody and that somehow or another, this guy needs to be brought back to America. That's what the left is arguing for, that he needs to be returned to America.

[00:13:31] He, but he's not a legal resident here. He wasn't here legally. Now, if you want to argue like a logically consistent, uh, standard would be that, okay, we sent him to the wrong place. It's his home country. So maybe we pay for a flight to take him from his home country. To some other country. That'll take him. Like that would be a logically consistent argument to make, but that's not the argument they're making. They're saying, bring him back here,

[00:14:00] but he was here illegally. Such a mistake should not be downplayed. Says David Strom. The system broke down and something that it's something that should not have happened. But the claim that he was some, you know, poor innocent father who was hurting nobody and was casually ripped off the streets and sent to a torture camp for no reason is complete and utter BS.

[00:14:25] The Atlantic wrote that in Monday's court filing or the original piece, I should say, came from the Atlantic. And what Strom says is that the court filing, uh, that was, uh, yesterday or sorry, day before yesterday, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Garcia had been deported accidentally. Quote, although ice was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,

[00:14:54] according to the government in the court filing. He had received protected legal status from an immigration judge. He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for his return and to withhold payment to the Salvadoran government for the use of all of the, the jail space. Like we're apparently paying El Salvador $6 million a year to jail all of these deportees.

[00:15:22] And El Salvador asked, they made the offer like, yeah, we'll take them because El Salvador has been cracking down on their, uh, violent gangs and, and, uh, criminal cartels down there. So we're paying them for the jail space. And so what the lawyers for this guy are saying, you need to withhold payment for all of the deportees down there. Re, withhold the payment to El Salvador for housing all of these prisoners until we get this one guy back, who by the way, is an El Salvadoran national.

[00:15:53] He was still here quote legally because he made the claim that if he was deported back to El Salvador, he might face torture. After all, gang members do actually torture other gang members. So he has a legitimate fear. He would have done the same to his rival gang members. So his fear is probably pretty rational again, if he was actually MS 13, which was never proven in court, but the judge said, yeah, there's enough evidence to conclude that he may have been. Here's a great idea.

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[00:17:43] immigration judge to deny him bond and order him removed. 2019, six years ago. Garcia was ordered to be removed six years ago. After he had been in the country for almost as long, he then filed an asylum claim and obtained a withholding of removal order under the convention against torture. Essentially,

[00:18:12] he argued that despite his being here illegally and likely being a gang member based on the previous finding that he could be tortured if he was sent back to El Salvador. Such an order could still allow the government to deport him, but not to his home country, at least not without first contesting the order. And he has been using that order since 2019 to avoid deportation.

[00:18:35] It does not change that the Trump administration emphasizing government incompetence screwed up by deporting him to the country that he wasn't supposed to be deported back to based on that 2019 order. This highlights the need for checks in the program, says David Strom at hot air dot com. So, again, he was eligible for deportation.

[00:19:01] The issue in question is what country he could be deported to. That's the question. The hellion says, but Pete. No, hang on a second. I just lost it. Here it is. But Pete, see their legal right to be here is them being alive. Don't you understand? That's that's the standard. To do to do. This is from Paul. His name's all capitalized.

[00:19:30] So I feel like he's yelling. Um, do you not vet your guest speakers? Um, okay. I don't have guest speakers on the program. I have guests. Um, and, uh, yes, I do. I, I find out who they are. I've known and followed Will Chamberlain actually for a long time, years. And, uh, the article three project, I'm aware of what they do. Sometimes I ask those questions about like, what is the article three project about to let you know what the article three project is about.

[00:19:59] And you can arrive at different conclusions. Paul, about what Will outlined. I gave you and you can go to my, uh, prep sheet and you can see the, um, uh, the link to his, uh, his analysis of the case. He put it all out there on Twitter. He's got the, the screen grabs of the court orders and the, uh, the documents from the, uh, the immigration court to explain all of the stuff that he outlines in his, uh, in his analysis.

[00:20:29] So back to Paul's email. Do you not vet your guest speakers? Will Chamberlain said multiple times, the Salvatore immigrant is home. Now I'm all for deportation, but he isn't home. He is in Seacott prison, which if you don't know what a pupusa is, I'm sure you don't know the type of prison that is. Uh, I, I am aware of the kind of prison that is, it's for terrorists. That's what it was. And gang members. That's what they built it for.

[00:20:58] Like it can house 40,000 inmates. It's massive. And, uh, I think they're only at like 14,000 right now, but it could hold up to 40,000. And, you know, the, uh, anti-incarceration folks around the globe are very upset about the conditions and the way people are in prison there and all of that. Um, Will Chamberlain saying that he was sent home, meaning he was sent back to his home country. Now, if El Salvador would like to release the guy,

[00:21:26] cause he's not an MS 13 gang member and they've got no records of him ever participating in any kind of gang activity, that kind of stuff. Okay. But he was ordered to be deported. And he was only supposed to not go back to El Salvador, which is why I said a logically consistent response would be something like, okay, well send him to another country. And what that other country does with that person, like we,

[00:21:52] we cannot control everybody and they do not have a right to be here. He entered the country illegally. He's not allowed to be here. He was not supposed to be here. So, yeah, they, they messed up and they sent him to El Salvador. So you want to try to get him out of that place and send him someplace else? Okay. I'm open to trying to do that. You want to try to adhere to that immigration, uh, courts ruling on that, uh, that narrow scope, but the idea that somehow or another,

[00:22:22] he shouldn't have been deported at all. I, I, I don't find that argument to be persuasive, um, in the least. Um, Paul's email continues, but ultimately that is where ice messed up, not in deporting him, but sending him to the most strict prison in the world. No, they, they, they messed up by sending him to that country, by sending him back to El Salvador. That's where the immigration order said he, you can't send him back to his home country.

[00:22:51] And so when Will Chamberlain was saying back home, he's talking about the home country. So I think you're hearing maybe something that you want to hear, but that's how Will was saying is that they sent him back home to his home country. Um, again, the finding that he was a member of MS 13 came up in the court, in the immigration court, because Garcia had asked for bond. Okay.

[00:23:22] Because they found that he had crossed the border illegally in 2012 and he was therefore removable. That is a totally independent question of whether or not, then whether or not he was in MS 13, right? You have two specific data points there. Number one, did he come here illegally? And number two is the MS 13 or was he? Two separate things. And the first one really is the only one that matters. He was, he was removable.

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[00:24:51] Mail orders are accepted too. Get all the details at createavideo.com. Daily Caller News Foundation reporting the Trump administration says that it is a broken record. Sorry, it has broken a record. Sorry, yeah, that's my fault. It's broken a record for all time lowest border encounters in a single month.

[00:25:15] That marks a dramatic turnaround from the monthly border encounters experienced under the Biden White House, which is weird because I thought we couldn't do anything unless we got that bad border bill passed. Border Patrol agents counted roughly 7,180 crossings,

[00:25:38] so 71,80 crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border during the month of March, according to data that was released yesterday by Customs and Border Protection. This figure comes in sharp contrast to the monthly average of 155,000 border crossings. Yeah, yeah, from that's over the previous four years,

[00:26:07] the average daily border crossings was 5,100. Okay, so you had 5,100 per day under Biden, and you have 7,200 in one month under Trump. Daily southern border apprehensions have now dropped to around 230 each day. So every day along the border, they apprehend 230 people.

[00:26:36] That is the lowest in recorded U.S. history. Do you remember, was it Mitt Romney who made the comment about self-deportation? And everybody lost their minds? And I never understood why, because that is simply stating fact, that people will respond to incentives. It is a completely rational,

[00:27:06] logical thing to do. And so if it becomes too difficult to enter, people cease trying to enter. If it becomes too difficult to stay, people will not stay. Those are the incentives. You make it an unattractive thing for people to do, then they won't do it as much. The incredible turnaround follows Donald Trump's overhaul of the immigration enforcement system. Since reentering the White House in January,

[00:27:36] his administration declared an emergency that allowed more resources, including the military, to be diverted to the border. The administration also successfully coerced the Mexican and Canadian governments to beef up their own border security, and it scrapped a popularly used asylum app and prioritized border wall construction, which you don't even hear much about that anymore, do you? The border wall?

[00:28:05] I haven't seen any real reporting on that since Trump got in. I'm not saying there hasn't been. I'm just saying I haven't seen it, and I follow the news pretty closely, and I haven't seen anything. There's not been any kind of outrage at, you know, the construction of the wall going on and all of this. I did see stories that they scrapped the app and replaced it with the CBP1 app, I think is what it was called,

[00:28:32] which made it super easy for hundreds of thousands of people to come in and claim asylum under the, you know, the multiple choice questions that they were asked. And then, you know, the people coming in were coached by their coyotes who would say, you know, say yes, yes, no, no, or whatever on the four questions. And then you would get it. You would get the asylum and you would get a court date for like eight years from now. And you were golden.

[00:28:59] It was a system constructed to flood the country. That's why they made it so easy. The Trump White House has also heavily leaned into interior enforcement. Detaining and deporting criminal illegal migrants and mass across the country, resulting in many illegal migrants too discouraged to even try their chances at illegal entry at the U.S.-Mexico border.

[00:29:28] I've said this for the last 20 years. That's how long we have been arguing over. It's actually longer. That's how long I've been arguing in this debate my entire adult life, basically. when illegal immigration exploded about 20 years ago. And I have always said that it is a rational thing for people in other countries. If they want a better life,

[00:29:55] it's a rational thing for them to pick up and even make that kind of long, treacherous trek into America across the southern border. That is the rational choice to make. When the American government doesn't care to enforce its own immigration law. Right. If you can like if you can get across the border, you can probably end up staying. For a very, very, very long time. Have kids here.

[00:30:25] They become citizens. You can then tether yourself to those kids and then bring in other family members through the chain migration process. So it's a rational thing for these families to do. I understand that. But at some point, the juice is not worth the squeeze. Right. At some point, the risk of making that treacherous journey and then getting caught and sent back home. When you believe that that is a more than likely outcome, then you're not going to make the trip in the first place, which,

[00:30:55] by the way, can save those people's lives and spare some of those people from being assaulted along the way. Sanctuary jurisdictions across the country and other areas inundated with illegal migrants once overrun by the national border crisis have steadily begun closing many of their migrant shelters. With so few illegal migrants coming in, local leaders said the cost of running the shelters is no longer justified.

[00:31:19] The dramatic changes at the southern border also sharply contrast from a prevailing narrative during the 2024 presidential election election, in which many Democrat opponents of Trump claimed that the Biden's bad border bill deal was needed to address the illegal immigration crisis. The changes currently happening at the border have largely resulted from administrative changes by Trump. No new congressional action was needed. It never was.

[00:31:48] It never was. It's just a matter of will to enforce the law. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalendershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone. Thank you. Thank you.