National, Regional and Local News

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Mistakenly deported man is alive and detained in El Salvador, Trump admin says
The filing is in an effort to comply with Judge Paula Xinis’ order from Friday, which demanded the government provide a daily status report of Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts.

April 12, 2025, 7:52 PM EDT
By Gary Grumbach and Rebecca Cohen

The Trump administration, in a filing posted to the docket several minutes after a 5 p.m. Saturday deadline, said a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador is alive and remains detained there.

The late-in-the-day filing is in an effort to comply with Maryland-based U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ order from Friday, which demanded the government provide a daily status report on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts and conditions, along with any efforts being taken to bring him back to the United States.

“It is my understanding based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego Garcia is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador,” Michael G. Kozak, a senior bureau official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, wrote in a two-page sworn declaration. “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”

In a separate filing also submitted Saturday evening, asking for additional relief, attorneys for Abrego Garcia used President Donald Trump’s words against him.

“Yesterday, President Trump confirmed that the United States has the power to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from prison and return to the United States: ‘If the Supreme Court said, ‘Bring somebody back,’ I would do that. ... I respect the Supreme Court,” the attorneys quoted Trump as telling reporters Friday night.

The attorneys were referencing a Thursday ruling from the high court that ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from a Salvadoran prison to which he was sent on March 15.

“Of course,” the man's lawyers wrote, “that is precisely what the Supreme Court did when it ruled that this Court’s injunction ‘properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.’”

However, Trump appeared to walk back his Friday message in a Saturday post on Truth Social.

In the post, Trump said he is working with President Bukele of El Salvador “to eradicate terrorist organizations, and build a future of Prosperity.”

“President Bukele has graciously accepted into his Nation’s custody some of the most violent alien enemies of the World and, in particular, the United States,” Trump wrote. “These barbarians are now in the sole custody of El Salvador, a proud and sovereign Nation, and their future is up to President B and his Government.”

The two leaders are scheduled to meet Monday in the White House.

Attorneys for Abrego Garcia are asking the district court to order the government to, by the end of the day Monday, take specific steps to comply with the injunction in the case and to order expedited discovery of the government’s actions — or failure to act — in facilitating Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States.

They are also asking the court to order the government to show cause by 10 a.m. Monday as to why it should not be held in contempt due to its failure to comply with the court’s prior orders, including any failure to a comply with the court’s April 11 order that stated the government needed to provide, by Friday morning, information on what steps it was taking to coordinate Abrego Garcia’s return following the Supreme Court’s order from the day prior.

Xinis on Friday had directed the Trump administration to “take all available steps to facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return following Thursday’s high court order. She also asked for a daily update on Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts.

The Supreme Court decision did not require the Trump administration to immediately try to return Abrego Garcia because Xinis’ deadline to bring him home had already passed. But the unsigned decision stated that the government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

The ruling rejected the administration’s emergency appeal of Xinis’ April 4 order, which called for Abrego Garcia’s return by April 7.

On Friday, the government said it needed more time to provide Xinis with the requested information on Abrego Garcia.

The Maryland father, a legal resident protected from deportation by a 2019 court order, was mistakenly sent to the Salvadoran prison along with other men who were alleged to be gang members.

The Trump administration claims Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, though he has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. His attorneys said there is no evidence he was in the gang, and immigration officials have conceded he should not have been sent to El Salvador, his country of birth, calling it an “administrative error.”

Saturday is the first time since March 15 that the government has said Abrego Garcia is alive.

Xinis is set to hold a hearing Tuesday afternoon to check in with the government on where it is in terms of getting Abrego Garcia back to the U.S.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigr ... rcna201018

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Suspect in custody after arson attack on Pa. governor’s home, police say
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) and his family awoke to the sound of police banging on their door as they responded to the fire at the mansion in Harrisburg.

Updated
April 13, 2025 at 5:45 p.m. EDT 23 minutes ago
By Praveena Somasundaram


Damage to Gov. Josh Shapiro's residence is shown after someone set fire to the building. (Sean Simmers/The Patriot-News/AP)

Pennsylvania officials on Sunday took one man into custody in their investigation of a fire that was set at Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence overnight while he and his family were asleep inside.

Cody Balmer, 38, of Harrisburg, was taken into custody Sunday in connection with what Shapiro (D) described as a “targeted” attack hours after he and his family had held a Seder dinner to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Passover at his home, the state’s official governor’s residence.

Charges had not yet been filed, but are likely to include attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated arson and aggravated assault on an enumerated person, Dauphin County District Attorney Francis Chardo said in a news conference Sunday evening.

Balmer came over a fence on the property, with homemade incendiary devices, before forcibly entering the residence and setting a fire, officials alleged Sunday. Balmer was apprehended later in the day in Harrisburg.

Around 2 a.m., Shapiro and his family were awoken by a state trooper assigned to their security detail banging on their door, telling them they needed to leave immediately, the governor said in the news conference. He, his wife, their children, their dogs and other family members staying at the residence were evacuated safely, Shapiro said.

On Sunday morning, the Pennsylvania State Police described the fire as “an act of arson.” Officials extinguished the fire, which they said was in a different part of the residence than Shapiro and his family, but it caused “a significant amount of damage.” The investigation is ongoing.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.


Damage to Gov. Josh Shapiro's residence is shown after someone set fire to the building. (Sean Simmers/AP)

On Saturday, Shapiro posted a photo online of his family’s table for Seder, a ceremonial dinner marking the Passover holiday.

The governor’s residence, built in 1968, sprawls over 29,000 square feet in the state’s capital of Harrisburg, about 100 miles west of Philadelphia. In addition to having served as the home of eight governors and their families during their time in office, the residence features art exhibits and other Pennsylvania memorabilia on its first floor.

This a developing story and will be updated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2 ... residence/

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[Owendonovan]

"The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday."

Maybe try something along the lines of "We feel horrible this happened to Pennsylvania's Governor and his family."

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April 15, 2025 3:23PM
“Where the Writ of the Courts Does Not Run”
By Walter Olson

Until yesterday, April 14, there was still some prospect of sidestepping the worst legal possibilities in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. First, and most obviously, the Trump administration could simply have brought Garcia home from El Salvador’s brutal gulag to face whatever further legal process it might choose to set in motion. Any normal administration would have done this after it emerged that the Maryland man had been sent to El Salvador by mistake against the terms of a previous and binding court order. Had the Trump administration simply been seeking short-term goodwill with the public, it would surely have taken this easy way out. That it did not suggests that it was instead building toward a longer-term objective it saw as more important.

Alternatively, or in addition, Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele could have expelled Garcia into the hands of the Trump administration once our courts had clearly ruled his continued captivity there is contrary to US law. That would have avoided the sort of insult to the authority of US law and the US courts that a small nation might not wish to hazard. (In practice, as we know, Bukele fired off a mocking “Oopsie” tweet after one person-snatching against a court’s direction, which was then shared by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and presidential adviser Elon Musk.)

As part of either move, the Trump administration could have endorsed the simple and logical idea that an inmate who was in the Salvadoran prison at the United States’ behest, under an agreement between the two governments, was in so-called constructive US custody. This would reassure doubters that whatever the other problems with such a foreign prison arrangement, the US executive branch would remain accountable to the courts for enforcement of inmates’ rights under US law and the Constitution, with the prisoners of US origin perhaps retaining roughly the same rights as if they had been imprisoned in Texas or Louisiana.

But it didn’t do that. It is universally understood that the standup routine in which each country’s administration pretends the other is the one that needs to act is purely for stage purposes, as prearranged as any pro wrestling kayfabe. The administration has even refused to let a federal district court see the contents of its agreements, if any, with Bukele, claiming they’re classified, while also broadly asserting that its constitutional foreign affairs power forbids courts from probing into its disposition of US-origin prisoners abroad.

The point of the wink-wink buddy act between Trump and Bukele is to effectuate what we should reasonably assume has been Trump’s objective all along: to create an offshore zone in which persons of Trump’s choosing can be whisked out of the United States and taken to a place of detention “beyond the writ of” the US courts, to use an old-fashioned wording—a place where the Constitution no longer protects them because no US court has jurisdiction to identify and vindicate their rights.

The most immediate right at stake is the right of habeas corpus, which now cannot be enforced in pursuit of Abrego Garcia’s liberty or his return to a place of detention in the United States. But he has practically lost all constitutional rights, not just the one. The Eighth Amendment, for example, would ordinarily protect him from the infliction of cruel and unusual punishments. But Bukele and Trump smilingly assure us that its coverage stops at the water’s edge.

Trump has been loudly talking for weeks about sending native-born American citizens to the El Salvador prisons too; his spokesperson Karoline Leavitt confirmed this the other day. Trump did so again yesterday, telling Bukele that he would need to build several more prisons because the “home-grown” prisoners were coming next.

In other words, even assuming that the “home-grown” prisoners (unlike Abrego Garcia) have received fair process at previous stages, Trump aims to send them to a place where central constitutional rights such as habeas and the Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment will have been stripped from them. If they are held beyond the expiration of their original US sentences, who can sue and where?

Trump says he’s waiting to go ahead on sending US citizen prisoners until Attorney General Pam Bondi reports back as to whether it’s legal, but Bondi’s subservience is beyond doubt, so if he wants a “yes,” a “yes” he will get. He also talks of starting with the most violent prisoners, the sort who push innocents in front of subway trains—in practice, criminals of that sort usually are convicted under state law and aren’t in federal custody anyway—but we all know Trump’s definition of “violent” is elastic. An Axios Mar. 21 headline: “Trump suggests sending Tesla vandals to El Salvador prisons.”

We know where this is headed. Many who have not yet spoken up know too, if they’re honest.

https://www.cato.org/blog/where-writ-co ... es-not-run

[dryrunguy]

And to my knowledge, this administration has not yet defined "native-born American citizens." The average citizen or Trump voter, I presume, assumes he/they are talking about naturalized citizens born on U.S. soil to people who are not in the U.S. legally. But no one, to my knowledge, has actually said that. And until they do (not that it will mean much if/when someone actually says it because you can't believe anything that spews from the orifices of these people), the possibilities are really quite endless. Political enemies? Maybe. Mainstream news media journalists and editors? Maybe. Transpeople? Maybe.

Me? Maybe.

And if it was me, who would stop them? My legion of blood relatives who voted for the bastard? I doubt it.

[ponchi101]

Or recently naturalized citizens, like my nephew-in-law or my sister-in-law, who received their American citizenships this year.
He would be an easy target. Looks very S. American (i.e. NOT blue eyed blonde) and has a heavy accent.
YAIT.

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He's alive and appears to be in good health.