WHY KILMAR ABREGO GARCIA IS STILL IMPORTANT. Consider two recent stories about illegal immigration. The first is the continuing saga of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran who illegally crossed the border and is charged with human smuggling in Tennessee; who has been credibly accused of membership in the violent, transnational gang MS-13; and whose wife filed a domestic violence complaint seeking protection against him.
The latest news is that United States authorities offered Abrego Garcia a deal regarding the human smuggling charge: plead guilty and be deported to Costa Rica after serving his sentence. There, authorities said, he could live as a legal resident in “a Spanish-speaking country that is regarded as the safest in Latin America,” as the Washington Post put it.
If Abrego Garcia refused the deal, authorities said, he would be deported anyway — to Uganda, which recently agreed to accept some deported migrants from the United States. Abrego Garcia’s lawyer noted that Uganda is “halfway across the world” and said “his safety and liberty would be under threat” there.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who has dealt with the case for months, put matters on hold and ordered a hearing “to consider questions such as whether Mr. Abrego Garcia should be allowed to be deported to a country of his choice and whether he might face danger if sent to Uganda.”
We’ll see what happens. Right now, it seems unlikely that Abrego Garcia will end up in equatorial Africa, but the Trump administration is determined to remove him from the United States.
One thing we do know is that the administration’s immigration enforcement, focused on illegal border crossers like Abrego Garcia, is having far-reaching effects. Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security reported that 1.6 million illegal immigrants had left the country in the seven months since President Donald Trump took office.
Confirming those figures, the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter immigration controls, wrote, “Our preliminary estimate is that the number of illegal immigrants declined … from 15.8 million in January of this year to 14.2 million in July. This reverses the dramatic increase in the illegal immigrant population we have reported from January 2021 to January 2025,” that is, during the administration of President Joe Biden.
A relatively small fraction of the 1.6 million illegal immigrants who left the U.S. were deported. The far larger number decided to leave on their own, at a time when it was becoming clear that being in the United States illegally could be a serious problem for them.
That’s what enforcement of immigration law does; it has an effect beyond the specific people who are detained or deported. In the Biden years, allowing millions to cross illegally into the U.S. without consequence encouraged many more to do the same. Now, deporting even a small group of illegal border crossers is encouraging a large number of others to get right with the law and save themselves a lot of trouble in the process. Look for the Trump administration to keep it up.
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