A Complacent Gesture of Freedom

 There was some long-overdue good news yesterday in the Abrego Garcia case. A federal judge ordered him released from ICE detention, and the government now has no immediate prospect, at least, of following through on their attempts to deport him to Liberia, or Uganda, or any of the other improbable locations they have floated as ultimate destinations, purely in order to retaliate against him for daring to assert his legal and human rights. 

All of this is surely good news. And yet: he still has to check in periodically with ICE agents. The administration has vowed meanwhile to fight "tooth and nail" to appeal Judge Xinis's order and somehow re-deport him or separate him from his family.

Besides—there is also the disgraceful fact that he was wrongfully detained and deported in the first place. Kilmar Abrego Garcia has spent most of the last year either in a secret prison in El Salvador, where he was tortured, or in an ICE detention facility where he has been separated from his wife and children—all because the Trump administration has sought to make him the face of their mass deportation agenda. 

Their relentless efforts to smear and destroy an innocent man, purely in order to avoid admitting they were wrong to deport him in the first place—their abject willingness to lie and disgrace themselves by telling patent untruths about him, purely for the sake of propaganda—brings to mind nothing so much as the way French reactionaries treated Alfred Dreyfus during the Third Republic. 

And so,  with yesterday's ruling, the anti-Dreyfusards of our day have come to a richly-deserved defeat—at least for now. And this, surely, is something to celebrate. Hooray! Human rights and the rule of law were vindicated!

But let's not get too carried away. The man still lost almost a year of his life—with unfathomable anxiety and suffering along the way—to this obscene exercise in gratuitous cruelty. His release now cannot give those months back to him. Nor can it make up for the agony he and his family have already had to endure. 

The same goes for Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, and other high-profile victims of this administration's attempt to punish free speech by detaining people without cause. Most of them have likewise since been released from ICE custody—after federal courts intervened to vindicate their First Amendment rights—but not before the government was first allowed to inflict months of separation from their loved ones and a culpable loss of freedom that can never be made up.

I'm reminded of what Harry Alan Potamkin once wrote, in a piece called "Seven Years"—about a man he knew who had been railroaded and imprisoned for years of his life because he happened to be a member of the IWW. At the end of those seven years, he was released. And from the government's perspective, they had done right by him. But they could never give back to him the years they stole—or remedy the effect this injustice had on his young son Bucky. 

"[T]he American government had tortured him too long," wrote Potamkin (a radical poet and film critic of the 1930s). "I have thought of Bucky as the symbol of that terrible cruelty which could imprison and torment for seven years men born free, and then with a complacent gesture of freedom think that all is forgiven. The gallantry that slays and then forgives!"

So it is in this case. It would be all too complacent of us indeed to conclude from this that just because Abrego is free at last, everything is fine now and all is right with the world. Abrego Garcia's family has been subjected to all too much torture at our government's hands for everything to be forgiven so easily. There is a wrong here that cannot be undone or recompensed; and for which our government has not even begun to atone. Terrible cruelty indeed!