The Name of Kilmar Ábrego García
by Zach Rabiroff
“The president directed the Departments of Homeland Security and Justice to ‘apprehend, restrain, secure, and remove every’ Venezuelan migrant, 14 and older, who is deemed to be a part of Tren de Aragua and who lacks U.S. citizenship or permanent residency.” So began the news coverage of the abduction and subsequent deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García on March 15, one passenger in the three planeloads bearing 261 unnamed Latin American immigrants taken from their homes and vanished from American life. On one level the moment was shocking, involving as it did the activation of the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act, last invoked in the wartime detention of Japanese Americans during the 1940s. On another the coverage was blandly conventional, traditional; roundups and deportations in the United States are routinely covered not as actions affecting individual lives, but as aggregate statistics of migrants in and migrants out.
Nearly 80 years ago, Woody Guthrie’s song “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” described the same phenomenon. Guthrie, the story goes, had been incensed on reading news coverage of a deportation flight that had crashed enroute from California to Mexico, in which the passengers were referred to only as “deportees.”
It was a melodramatic and even condescending gesture; the names he sings are generic Mexican first names (“goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita /
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria.”) But the song is a moving one, all the same: “Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves? / The radio says, ‘They are just deportees.’”
Two weeks would pass between the illegal abduction of Ábrego García and the administration’s sworn admission in a court filing that it had sent him to El Salvador through an “administrative error.”
“Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was in the U.S. legally, is now in prison in El Salvador, and federal courts have no jurisdiction to order his release, the Trump administration said in a court filing,” reported the New York Times.
Day by day the criminal executive branch accelerates its war on immigrants with mass roundups, purged Social Security numbers, disappearances of innocent people to labor camps in foreign lands, and even the arrest of judges who attempt to thwart these crimes. This is the defining feature of the American brand of neo-totalitarianism: not merely the removal of “undesirables,” but the sudden and total erasure of individual lives from the collective memory. Like an airbrushed mid-century Soviet photograph, the portrait of America must be made to align with our newer, purer national history.
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