A top Trump administration official said those demanding due process for a wrongly deported Maryland dad might themselves be accused of “aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.”
Appearing on Rob Schmitt Tonight on Newsmax, Donald Trump’s senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, suggested critics of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s incarceration in a Salvadoran megaprison might even be committing a federal crime.
He said: “It’s not left and right, It’s not even Republican or Democrat. There’s one line that divides us: Do you love America or do you hate America? It’s really quite that simple.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Gorka, born in the U.K. to Hungarian parents, suggested in the Tuesday interview that Democrats who argue that Abrego Garcia should be returned to the U.S.—per the Supreme Court’s orders—don’t “love America.”
The former Newsmax host added that those who dissent against the Trump administration’s actions are “on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens on the side of the terrorists.”
He went even further, saying: “And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.”
Gorka failed to mention that Abrego Garcia’s alleged links to the MS-13 gang—used to justify his deportation—have been disputed and are based upon an allegation made in a field interview report from 2019, and a confidential informant supposedly telling police he was a member of the organization.
The cop who penned the field report was suspended in wild circumstances soon after he interviewed Abrego Garcia, yet his allegation is among the scant evidence the government has produced to support its MS-13 claim.
The informant reportedly claimed the father was part of the “Westerns” clique of MS-13. This is despite the fact that group operated out of Long Island and Abrego Garcia had never lived anywhere other than Maryland while in the U.S.
Additionally, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers were unable to interview the cop who supposedly spoke to the informant because of his suspension.
The government has also tried to justify the deportation of Salvadorian migrants based on their tattoos, using a point-scoring system to determine whether their ink relates to gang affiliation.
When he was arrested in 2019, ICE officers also reportedly pointed towards his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie as potential gang involvement indicators.
The El Salvador native had fled his home country in 2011 at age 16 after gang members threatened to kill him. He was arrested while undocumented, found hanging around outside a hardware store looking for day labor work.
He was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without being charged with any crimes.
At his deportation hearing in 2019, ICE stated that he was a danger to the community because he had been detained “in connection with a murder investigation,” and local police had “verified” he was a gang member.
Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and was granted a “withholding of removal” order, a legal form of protection that says the government won’t deport someone to their home country if the person is “more likely than not” to face persecution there.
Since he was picked up by ICE again in March this year, the Department of Justice has not presented any evidence in court showing gang affiliations.
Government lawyers have even “abandon[ed]” their earlier position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community,” a federal appeals court found.
But despite, this, top government officials continue to brand him as a danger and a “terrorist.”
His attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told NBC News that these claims “endanger his life.”
A 60 Minutes investigation discovered that at least three-quarters of the 250 men shipped to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) had no criminal records at all. The facility is notorious for human rights abuses.
The Trump administration has admitted it deported Abrego Garcia after an “administrative error,” but still refuses to bring him home.
In fact, it has doubled down. In a Wednesday X post, the Department of Homeland Security again branded him an “MS-13 gang member,” and revealed a protective order his wife took out against him in 2021.
Sharing the documents, DHS officials echoed comments from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt who said on Tuesday that he was “not the father of the year.”
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia had a history of violence and was not the upstanding ‘Maryland Man’ the media has portrayed him as,” the post said.
“According to court filings, Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence restraining order against him, claiming he punched, scratched, and ripped off her shirt, among other harm. This MS-13 gang member is not a sympathetic figure.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife—Jennifer Vasquez Sura—addressed the restraining order in a statement to Newsweek.
“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” she said. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.”
