US District Court Judge Paula Xinis came down hard on the Department of Justice lawyers defending the unlawful rendition of green-card holder Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a concentration camp in El Salvador. Xinis cited the Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision finding that the Trump administration had to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States as the final word backing her earlier ruling—and it should be. 

DOJ lawyers tried to cite Monday’s shameful Oval Office press conference, where the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” Nayib Bukele, dressed in a too-tight blue suit, insisted he would never, ever “smuggle” that “terrorist” back to the US, as “evidence” that the US can’t bring Abrego Garcia back.

Oh right, the superpower that has become El Salvador’s partner in human rights crime is the lesser power. Got it. If Donald Trump really wanted Abrego Garcia back, and Bukele refused, Trump would send the bush-league dictator to Guantánamo and never look back. We know puppy killer Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem got into that maximum security prison, with her showy Rolex, so heavy it might have killed a prison guard, for some torture porn. She could go get Abrego Garcia. This is the worst kayfabe ever.

Judge Xinis swatted the DOJ’s Drew Ensign like a fly, dismissing that Oval Office “evidence” as unworthy of the term. “The Supreme Court has spoken,” Xinis said, noting that the Monday Oval Office circus show “is not before the court.” She said she’d conduct full discovery, with genuine evidence, from both sides, on the government’s alleged “case” against Abrego Garcia, and on the plentiful evidence that there is none (as Justice Department lawyers have repeatedly admitted, calling his capture an “administrative error”). She also wants documentation of what the government has done to bring the Maryland father home, and said that so far, it looks like “nothing.”

Xinis said she wanted the discovery to move “fast,” adding, “Cancel vacations, cancel other appointments. I’m going to be available if you need to do it at odd hours or weekends. That’s what I’m talking about.”

All of that is the good news. The bad news is that Abrego Garcia is still languishing, illegally, in a concentration camp, far away from his family, for at least the next two to three weeks. Probably more. He could be tortured, or worse, and we would never know the truth.

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Like many people, I hoped Xinis would hold the DOJ lawyers in contempt, which she admitted she was trying to avoid. My hope was always unrealistic. Even with apparent Supreme Court backing, she has to conduct careful discovery, never mind that the DOJ has defied all of her orders to report on concrete steps it has taken to bring Abrego Garcia back. She is betting that the backing of the Supreme Court, as attenuated as it can seem, will force the Trump administration to produce more evidence of its “case.”

But there is no case. Although the DOJ has repeatedly called the rendition a mistake, at the creepy Trump press conference Monday, Santa Monica sociopath Steven Miller, along with corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi, began recirculating claims from almost a decade ago that Abrego Garcia was a member, maybe even a leader, of the Salvadoran gang MS-13. Prosecutors once tried to make that case, but in 2019 the source of the testimony was found to be a corrupt cop who got his information secondhand, and the attempt to deport Abrego Garcia was dropped. Yes, that was under the first Trump administration.

As tenacious journalist and legal detective Marcy Wheeler asked Tuesday: “Why did Donald Trump free someone who he purports to be a dangerous terrorist?”

I know, I know. We can’t fight them with facts. But we can fight them with stories and images. Even NewsMax is doing its part, with a lot of the clips of Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura.

“I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive,” she told reporters. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn’t forgotten about you. Our children are asking when you will come home.… They miss their dad so much.”

There are also characters like podcaster Joe Rogan, one of Trump’s most important allies, who are irate about Abrego Garcia’s fate.

Let’s also remember what “the coolest dictator” has been accused of, via my friend and Nation contributor Roberto Lovato:

He was condemned by governments around the world, including by the Biden and Trump State Departments for violations detailed in the 2022 State Department report on El Salvador’s human rights record, which listed such abuses as: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.

Let’s also remember: Dear Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer called Trump’s defiance of a Supreme Court ruling his “red line,” after so many months of impotence. “If Trump doesn’t obey the Supreme Court,” he stated, that would be “different than anything else. It’s a quantum leap different, because our democracy is then—248 years of American democracy, the Magna Carta is out the window, and we will all have to take extraordinary action.”

Hello, Dear Leader, it’s happening. What are you doing?

We can’t rely on the courts, or on our political leaders, to get us out of this, or to get Abrego Garcia, and so many others, back home. But I also believe they have a special responsibility to try. I’m heartened by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador—he’s on his way as I write—as well as promises by colleagues like New Jersey Senator Cory Booker to follow him to that autocracy and make a stand.

I don’t even want folks like Schumer and his lame deputy Dick Durbin to go to El Salvador, to be honest. I want them to turn their power over to senators like Van Hollen and Booker, Brian Schatz, Raphael Warnock, Jon Ossoff, Elizabeth Warren, and even forever young Bernie Sanders—a next-generation version of the senator (in mind if not body) who will do what needs to be done. (There are so many more in the House, of course, but to mention anyone—OK, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deserves her due—risks slighting so many others.)

This has been an evil shit show, and continues to be. But the utter uselessness of so many Democratic leaders has been shocking—and demoralizing to many people who want to stand up.

Let’s hope many of them make the trek to El Salvador the way another generation of leaders made the trek to the South African Embassy, protesting apartheid, in the mid-1980s. So many got arrested, and so many new leaders emerged.

Civil society needs to rise up to stop what’s happening. We need continuous nonviolent protest and relational organizing. But we also need our powerful political leaders to put their power on the line. I hope we see that soon.