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Yep.
I still remain a bit confused as to why the onus remains on the U.S. to seek his release.
Even if a U.S. Judge asserts jurisdiction and El Salvador chooses to humor this, a non-U.S. citizen being held by a non-U.S. country is not something we'd expect U.S. Judges to devote resources towards without some strong U.S. interests at stake.
The actual basis on and circumstances under which he was arrested and removed might bear scrutiny, but let us say that the Judge does determine he was wrongfully removed. Seems like the remedy is to release him and he can find his own way from there.
If a foreign national is being held in an El Salvadoran prison, then their home country ought to be the one they're contacting to seek release.
The emotional component becomes clearer to me when I flip the script. Imagining some random U.S. citizen sneaks into, I dunno, Italy. They catch him but a judge rules he can't be removed for the time being, and he marries an Italian lady and has some young kids in the meantime, but never goes through the naturalization process.
Then the next Italian Prime Minister comes in and actively starts deporting migrants, but not necessarily to their home countries. If the U.S. Citizen ends up in an Albanian prison, do we actually expect him to cry to the Italian government to bring him back? Does anyone really feel like a U.S. citizen is entitled to activate the Italian Justice system to come to his rescue?
OR more absurdly if Italy ships him to the U.S. and has the U.S. agrees to hold him in prison, do we really, REALLY think he's going to succeed by asking Italian courts to intervene, rather than taking it up directly with the U.S. government to get himself released and, lets say, his wife and kids brought over here?
The weight of the argument in favor of bringing Abrego Garcia back seems to be
If we discard those arguments, if Garcia is released, only "LEGAL" positions (not really moral ones) that make sense are that he could try to return to the U.S. on his own dime and through legal channels, or he can return 'home' and bring his wife and kids with him to reunite the family.
Well, okay, but, like. Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole, right?
We're clear on that?
Because it feels relevant to the case. "Apologies to the guy who we mistakenly paid for Stalin to put in a Siberian gulag, our bad. However, being from the Baltics, he should really be seeking redress from the legitimate Soviet government for any wrongful imprisonment and torture, not from us" is… kind of a non-starter?
Like, I get the US Gov can't really acknowledge this point on an official, diplomatic level. Nobody wants to go to war with fucking El Salvador. "Third World prisons are horrible torture-gulags and the POTUS is still expected to shake the President's hand on camera when we need a trade deal signed" is a fact of life. But when it comes to ordinary truth-seeking citizens like ourselves discussing the ethics of the case, we should really drop the pretense that Garcia has a snowball's chance in Hell of getting genuine due process from Bukele's government. It's either help from the U.S. or he never sees his kids again. Let's be realistic.
No.
Not right. Partisan hyperbole squared, even, due to how much of the American media that carries that tune gets it in turn from Bukele's own political opposition. That political opposition in turn has its own partisan interests in characterizing their defeat as illegitimate, in hopes that a sympathetic US administration will overthrow the popularly elected leader to their partisan benefit.
There are people in this thread saying that they approve of the fact that it's a torture prison, that we should make American prisons more torturous, and even that getting a death sentence in the US is probably preferable to being sent to the Salvadoran prison. "The Salvadoran prison is awful" does not seem to be a claim exclusive to a left-wing media bubble.
To put the question another way - I mean - are you confident about your chances of seeing daylight again if you were thrown in jail by the Bukele government on vague, spurious suspicion of being connected to a gang in some way? I'm not sure there's enough money in the world to make me chance it.
Ah, but that wasn't your original claim now, was it? Nor was it even the only claim.
And thus we watch the retreat from the bailey to the motte.
Is there a reason to believe vague and spurious suspicions are relevant metaphors for this case? After all, the claim of being a gang member comes from the deportee, which was both the grounds of his non-deportation order but also non-asylum.
Yes it was. My original claim which you disputed was "Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole". "The Salvadoran prison is awful" is a shorter way of restating the same thing: "awful" is short for "a human-rights-violating hellhole" and anyone who runs human-rights-violating hellholes is, ipso facto, a dictator.
…?? Source, please? I thought everyone here agreed that the claim that Garcia was a gang member originated with an anonymous informant for US law enforcement in 2019.
Alas, you do not get to redefine what words meant to get around your different, less pejorative, and more defensible choice of words when challenged.
I did not intend "awful" to be less pejorative than the long version, and I'm happy to defend the long version in the exact same terms. I am confident the three posters I linked above would agree with "hell-hole" or "torture-prison" just as much as with "awful".
'I did not intend for a word used routinely for things less miserable than hell-characterizations to be less pejorative than hell-characterizations' is certainly a denial of a motte-and-bailey argument.
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