Deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia (to Uganda)

Presidente Trump has said he wants to deport a million people out of the United States every year.

One million illegal aliens per year.

Thus far in 2025, he's falling well short of that goal.

Estimates are in the neighborhood of 200,000 as of August.

But the one deportee most people can name remains Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

After months in a Salvadoran labor camp prison complex, Abrego Garcia returned to the United States in June.

But the latest news is that the federal government wants to deport him to Uganda.

He needs to never be in the United States of America, and our administration is making sure we're doing all that we can to bring him to justice.

We're going to try and understand why and wrap our heads around what his story tells us about our country on Today Explained.

With a Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase.

And you get big purchasing power.

So your business can spend more and earn more.

Capital One, what's in your wallet?

Find out more at capital1.com slash spark cash plus.

Terms apply.

Support for this show comes from Nike.

What was your biggest biggest win?

Was it in front of a sold-out stadium or the first time you beat your teammate in practice?

Nike knows winning isn't always done in front of cheering crowds.

Sometimes winning happens in your driveway, on a quiet street at the end of your longest run, or on the blacktop of a pickup game.

Nike is here for all of the wins, big or small.

They provide the gear, you bring the mindset.

Visit Nike.com for more information and be sure to follow Nike on Instagram, TikTok, and other social platforms for more great basketball moments.

My name is Ellie Hoenig.

I am CNN's senior legal analyst.

I'm a former federal and state prosecutor.

I am a writer for New York Magazine and Cafe.

I'm part of the Vox family.

And I have a new book coming up called When You Come at the King, Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President, from Nixon to Trump.

Outstanding.

And the last time I heard you say that was the last time you were on the show, which was back in April when we were last discussing the Obrego Garcia case.

At the time, of course, he was stuck in El Salvador.

Where is he now?

He is physically located in the United States, in Virginia.

I guess that's the good news for Kilmar Obrego Garcia.

The bad news is he's in custody.

He is in the custody of immigration officials.

Because the one thing I want to say right at the outset, to try to understand this whole saga around Kilmar Obrego Garcia, you have to understand there are two separate proceedings happening at the same time, but separate from one another, parallel really.

One of them is he's here in the country, in the United States, illegally, and so immigration authorities are trying to deport him.

That's happening in the immigration courts.

Separately, but mostly simultaneously, he also has a criminal case.

He's now been charged by indictment with certain federal crimes by the U.S.

Department of Justice.

So he's fighting both of those battles at once.

But as we speak, he is in the United States.

He's in Virginia in a federal immigration detention facility.

I feel like this story got a lot of attention early on because it was kind of easy to understand

why this would upset people.

But now it's gotten so complicated, it still feels like it's upsetting people.

But can you help us understand

how deeply complex it is exactly?

Can we take it chronologically from like where we last left off in El Salvador?

Kilmar Brego Garcia gets deported in March.

He's here illegally.

He gets deported, but to where?

El Salvador.

The one place on the globe the United States government was not allowed to send Kilmar Brego Garcia was El Salvador.

There was a pre-existing order from a judge saying he cannot be sent there because he has shown that he might face the risk of persecution or retribution.

This man lived here, had lived here for quite a few years, but he was picked up by ICE.

And then in spite of a judge's order saying that he should not be deported to El Salvador, he was sent to that prison that we've all seen on TV.

The filing said in part, quote, Abrego and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9 p.m.

to 6 a.m.

Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself.

Initially, the administration admitted in court that that was a clerical error, they claimed.

Case winds its way up to the U.S.

Supreme Court.

And the U.S.

Supreme Court says, well, you must, quote, facilitate, and this word got a lot of scrutiny, facilitate his return to the United States.

What does the Trump administration do?

They give that word facilitate essentially its narrowest possible interpretation.

And they do next to nothing.

And they basically take the position of, well, if he should happen to arrive here, then I guess we'll let him in.

And for a while, when we last spoke, he was in a sort of purgatory.

The big change in this case was the Department of Justice indicted Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Good afternoon.

We're here today to announce a major update in an important case.

And what they did at that point is they brought him back to the United States.

They made a big splashy announcement by the AG.

He's been indicted and we're bringing him back here now because he's a criminal and we're going to prosecute him.

The grand jury found that over the past nine years, Obrego Garcia has played a significant role in an alien smuggling ring.

He was a smuggler of humans and children and women.

And so he was brought back to the country to face prosecution.

But what has happened since then, this picks up where my last answer left off, is he got bail on the criminal case because this criminal case is so flimsy and such a mess.

And therefore, he was technically free.

So he got released on the criminal side, but immediately the immigration side swoops in and picks him back up, which brings us to him being in custody in Virginia.

So before we get to this sort of the two separate proceedings thing,

why did the United States government indict him and bring him back?

Was there pressure to do that?

Or were they just like, maybe we have a better chance with this other path?

I think really the play there was political.

I think it's a PR play because what happened while Kilmar Brego-Garcia was in this purgatory, while he was in El Salvador and there was this sort of stalemate about what's going to happen.

This debate broke out, this political debate where Democrats, I'll generalize here, were saying, I'm not vouching for the man.

I'm standing up for his rights because all of our rights are at risk if we don't.

The Trump administration and others were saying, yeah, but he's a horrible guy.

He's a gangster.

He's vicious.

He's violent.

He's a terrorist.

What DOJ did when they got this indictment is, first of all, they brought him back to prosecute him.

You don't, that is almost never the way things are done.

You don't deport someone, let them, you know, sort of waste away for a few months, and then bring them back to prosecute them and then potentially just re-deport them.

It makes no sense.

That's number one.

Number two, the way DOJ rolled out this case to me was such a tell that it was political.

The charges here against Kilmar Brego-Garcia are that he basically drove illegal aliens across state lines.

That's it.

Yet, if you looked at the DOJ announcement, Pam Bondi made a televised announcement with the cameras from behind the podium.

They say in the announcements, not in the indictment, but in their various announcements.

A co-conspirator alleged that the defendant solicited nude photographs and videos of a minor.

A co-conspirator also alleges the defendant played a role in the murder of a rival gang member's mother.

None of that's charged, but now what happens?

It's all out there.

People on the administration side say, you see, these facts demonstrate Abrego Garcia is a danger to our community.

And then the defense lawyers essentially pick it apart, which is why he got bail.

For the first time in five months, Kilmar Obrego-Garcia is no longer in federal custody and finally is reunited with his family.

So he gets bail in this criminal case.

He still has the ongoing proceedings regarding his status in this country.

How does he get bail in the first place?

So one of the big questions when you're arguing bail in the federal, and again, we're now on the criminal side, is how strong is the evidence of this person's guilt?

I've done, I don't know, more bail arguments than I could ever count.

And the defense lawyers really exposed that the charges against Kilmar Obrego Garcia were incredibly flimsy and based sometimes on third and fourth hand hearsay.

So I'll give you one example.

One of the arguments that the prosecutors made to keep Kilmar Obrego locked up on the criminal case is, well, we have evidence that he was transporting minors.

Okay, the way they established that is prosecutors pointed to a handwritten note.

Now, they don't know who wrote the the note.

They don't know where it came from, but it's a handwritten note that was in a cop's files.

A cop had done a traffic stop of Kilmar Brego Garcia.

And one of the notes

seems to reflect that somebody in the car had a birth date of 2007.

And so prosecutors can't explain who wrote that note or who it refers to, but they say, look, 2007, that would make the person a minor.

Then somebody photographs the handwritten note.

Then a cop sees the photograph of the handwritten note.

Then a cop tells an FBI agent about the handwritten note.

And then the FBI agent testifies to the grand jury.

So you can count.

That's three, four levels of hearsay.

And here's an even bigger kicker.

And the judge found this.

When you look at the handwritten note, it's not even clear whether that note says 2007, which would make the person a minor, or 2001.

You know, the seven and the one are kind of a little close in how they look, which would make the person not a minor.

And on top of that, prosecutors don't even know who the note refers to.

They don't know if it's a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a minor or an adult.

They can't locate the person.

They can't put a name on the person.

So that's how flimsy the government's proof is in this case.

And that's a reason that the judge cited.

She said, it doesn't mean the case is over.

It just means he's getting out on bail.

And that led to him then three days later being re-incarcerated, re-locked up on the immigration side of things.

And this is where Uganda enters the chat.

Exactly.

At this point, and this is where it starts to be almost overtly retributive.

Garcia has said he doesn't want to go back home to El Salvador.

That's what he said.

So we're honoring that request by providing him with an ultimate place to live.

We're not a travel booking agency.

It's not our job to say to illegal alien terrorists, pick your favorite destination in the world and we'll send you a charter jet there.

And now what his lawyers have done is said, whoa, whoa, whoa, put a pause on that.

He has a right to contest that because you don't have a lot of say if you're in the country illegally about where you get deported to, but you do have a right to due process to argue maybe I'm not the guy, maybe I'm not here illegally, and to argue that he would face persecution or danger if sent to that country.

And so there's now a different federal judge involved who's sort of overseeing the immigration case who has said, basically, I don't trust you, government.

You've played fast and loose, and you are not to move him out of this country until I've had a chance to decide this.

And so the judge is going to figure out whether it makes sense to send him to Uganda.

And what's really crazy about this is Abrego Garcia's lawyers have said he will gladly, they had done some work, they had connected with the government of Costa Rica and said, please just send it.

You can get rid of him if you want.

Just send him to Costa Rica.

He'll be safe there.

We've worked it out.

And the U.S.

government has said no.

I mean, if their concern was really getting him out of the country, this could be over by now.

And because you've been inside this system, Ellie, do you see the system working throughout the three, four, five months of this Kilmar Obrego Garcia case?

Or do you see it failing more?

I think it's, well, it certainly failed with respect to Kilmar Brego Garcia.

And I should note, by the way, that when when this indictment was being put together, a veteran career nonpartisan prosecutor in that U.S.

attorney's office resigned in protest.

And I think that tells you something.

But they failed.

They failed over and over and over again.

Now he's sitting in detention and he might not even get to go to Uganda like they want because there'll probably be a lot of protest over it.

I don't know.

We'll see.

But does that give you hope or no?

I mean, I'm not looking for the hope.

I'm just curious about your expertise.

Yes, I think I do.

I think the courts have done their job here.

I think, so far.

And that applies to the judge in the criminal case, the Supreme Court justice.

I mean, a lot of people, a lot of judges have done the right thing here and have said, no, you have to follow the rules.

You have to do things by the book.

You have to remain accountable.

But I guess from a political calculation, what does one fear more?

On the one hand, you know, having a bunch of legal setbacks coming out in these judicial opinions that are sort of nuanced, or just being able to say, we got this horrible guy and we want him out and Democrats want to keep him in here.

And look, you know, they want this terrorist to move in next to you.

Like, what plays better with the American public?

I'm not so sure.

Ellie Hoenig, if you like books, check his out.

Once more, it's called When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President.

From Nixon to Trump, it drops in a few days.

The president and his administration are using Kilmar Abrego Garcia to scare off other immigrants, to deter them.

The consequences, when we're back on Today, Explain.

Support for the program today comes from Shopify.

When you're creating your own business, you have to juggle a lot of roles: marketing, sales, outreach, design.

Shopify can simplify all of that.

Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and according to the company 10% of all e-commerce in the US, from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands brands just getting started like maybe I don't know yours they say they have hundreds of ready-to-use templates to help design your brand style and they say they can make marketing easier by creating email and social media campaigns so you can connect with customers wherever they be scrolling Shopify also has AI tools created for commerce they say can help you create product descriptions generate discount codes and more you can turn your big business idea into reality with Shopify on your side you can sign up for your one dollar per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com slash explained.

You can go to shopify.com slash explained.

That's shopify.com slash explained.

Does anyone have a cash register handy?

As a founder, you're moving fast towards product market fit, your next round, or your first big enterprise deal.

But with AI accelerating how quickly startups build and ship, security expectations are also coming in faster.

And those those expectations are higher than ever.

Getting security and compliance right can unlock growth or stall it if you wait too long.

Vanta is a trust management platform that helps businesses automate security and compliance across more than 35 frameworks like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and more.

With deep integrations and automated workflows built for fast-moving teams, Vanta gets you audit ready fast and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring as your models, infrastructure, and customers evolve.

That's why fast-growing startups like Langchain, Ryder, and Cursor have all trusted Vanta to build a scalable compliance foundation from the start.

Go to Vanta.com slash Vox to save $1,000 today through the Vanta for Startups program and join over 10,000 ambitious companies already scaling with Vanta.

That's vanta.com/slash box to save $1,000 for a limited time.

This message is brought to you by Apple Card.

Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers.

The titanium Apple Card is no different.

It's laser-etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple.

Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes.

Subject to credit approval, Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch.

Terms and more at AppleCard.com.

Explained.

Derek Thompson co-wrote a book called Abundance.

You may have heard of it, but he's also got a sub stack.

And on it this week, he wrote that the United States is on the precipice of a historic, if dubious, achievement.

We asked him to tell us about it.

Well, for the entirety of American history, the U.S.

has only known population growth.

The U.S.

grew through the Civil War.

We grew through the Spanish flu.

We grew through both world wars.

We grew through COVID, even despite the deaths of a million people.

But Donald Trump is on the precipice of a truly historic and, as you said, dubious achievement.

In 2025, it is absolutely possible that the U.S.

population shrinks for the first time on record.

And the math here is straightforward.

There's only two ways for a population to grow.

There's something called natural increase, which is births minus deaths, and there's net immigration, which is migrants who arrive minus migrants who leave.

Last year, births outnumbered deaths by about 500,000 people.

And that straightforwardly means that if net immigration declines by more than 500,000, the U.S.

could shrink for the first time in history.

And several demographers are, in fact, forecasting that net immigration could be negative 500,000 or in excess of that.

And that would mean essentially that, yes, the U.S.

would, America would, for the first time ever, be a shrinking nation.

Is the reason that this isn't like above the fold, you know, breaking news because we don't actually know if this is for sure going to happen next year, this year?

Yeah, we don't know this is going to happen.

So I spoke to William Fry, who's a really renowned demographer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and I said, you know, do you think it's possible the U.S.

shrinks this year?

And he said, quote, it's certainly possible.

My bet at the beginning of 2025 was that growth would be positive but very slow.

But it's certainly possible that the population could shrink this year, end quote.

So one possibility is that I'm wrong and the U.S.

doesn't shrink this year.

I do think population growth will be very low.

But I think most simply, the reason why we aren't talking about this is that I don't think enough people have put together the basic math here.

Number one, natural increase, births minus deaths, is very low.

U.S.

fertility is low.

I write a lot about that.

And number two, net immigration is low because of all these deportations and all the migrants that the Trump administration is scaring away from even trying to enter the U.S.

in the first place.

You think a lot about shrinking birth rates.

We just spent half our show talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and these two

very different stories somehow meet in the middle of this thing we're talking about right now, which is where this country's population might be heading.

How does something like the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia tie in to what might be happening right now with the country's population?

Well, immigration politics clearly has swung in a pendulum over the last few years.

Donald Trump's first term had some very cruel policies.

I'm establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America.

We don't want them here.

The executive order also stops the refugee program altogether for all refugees from anywhere for four months pending review and installs an indefinite ban on Syrian refugees.

More than 10,000 asylum seekers at the southern border have been sent back under the controversial Remain in Mexico policy.

1,995 children were taken from their migrant parents at the border.

That's an average of 48 kids separated from their families per day.

And then Joe Biden responded to those cruel policies by liberalizing immigration and liberalizing asylum law.

And that created some years of the highest in migration in American history.

I think in 2023, 2024, we had in excess of 2.3, 2.5 million immigrants coming into the U.S.

That's extraordinary.

And there was a backlash against that migrant surge.

Last week, a lot of people came in from the Congo, a big prison in the Congo in Africa.

Welcome to the United States.

We don't want to blame immigrants for higher housing prices, but we do want to blame Kamala Harris for letting in millions of illegal aliens into this country,

which does drive up cost him.

And that backlash is partly, not exclusively, but partly responsible for Donald Trump being the president now.

And he has swung the pendulum all the way back to not only shutting down the border, but also these extra-legal deportations, these, in many cases, illegal deportations, scaring migrants from coming over in the first place, sending ice into all these cities and rounding up people that he thinks doesn't look, that they think don't look like native-born Americans.

But what's really historic, I think, is combining that with the fact that, as you said, the fertility rate is low enough that without consistent immigration, the U.S.

is going to shrink very, very soon.

Most demographers thought the U.S.

wasn't going to shrink until the 2070s, 2080s.

Donald Trump's immigration policies might pull forward that moment of American shrinkage 60 years.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And you wrote on your stack about how this is going to affect three essential sectors of American life, food, housing, healthcare.

Please indulge us.

Well, little in life is more fundamental, right, than food, shelter, and medicine.

So it's pretty important that immigrants play a disproportionate role in each.

I'm going to start with farming.

Two-thirds of agricultural workers are immigrants.

Two-thirds.

So in the absence of new migrant arrivals, farms are going to struggle in a number of ways.

They can struggle to find replacements, and then wages go up for people working in agriculture.

That can be really good for folks working in agriculture, but it means higher prices for people who are buying produce, milk, meat at the grocery store, and we're already dealing with years of higher inflation.

Housing, immigrants account for about 50%, 60% of roofers, painters, drywall installers, plasterers.

So you need...

construction workers, you need immigrants to build houses.

And in fact, if you look across the country, 30 to 40% of the construction labor force is foreign-born in Florida, in Georgia, in Texas, in Nevada, in California, in New York.

Almost all of the largest housing markets are incredibly dependent on foreign labor.

So sometimes you hear this thing about like, you know, I say, you know, America is going to shrink this year.

And people say, oh, you know, thank God, you know, everywhere's too crowded.

Immigrants are competing for houses.

They're competing for jobs.

This is going to be fantastic for the country.

Well, guess what happens if you don't have enough people to build houses?

You don't have enough houses.

What happens to housing prices?

They don't go down, they go up because there's a housing shortage.

And then finally, healthcare.

Yeah, we're an aging nation and we need more clinicians and we need more caregivers.

And in a world with low immigration, we're going to have fewer clinicians and fewer caregivers.

This was one of the things that really surprised me most in my reporting.

I mean, just how immigrant-heavy the American medical labor force is.

Foreign-born people account for up to 25, 27% of America's physicians and surgeons.

One in six people working across the healthcare sector are foreign-born.

And so, if you have an aging country and you have fewer people to care for them, then once again, you could have higher prices and just, you know, longer lines at the hospitals, fewer people to be that home health aid for your sick parent, your sick grandparent, your uncle.

So, once again, I see major, major problems coming in a world where we have fewer immigrants.

Do you see the Trump administration trying to sort of counter their immigration policies with the effects they may have on the economy with other policies?

Are they aware of these pain points?

There are definitely folks in the Trump administration that just want an America with fewer people and certainly want an America with fewer non-white people.

I mean, that's clear.

I'm more interested in how Donald Trump will use immigration policy as a weapon.

So, one of the things I'm most interested in is Donald Trump's sort of theory of economic power.

And as far as I can tell, it's something like this.

He has a three-step formula for everything that he does.

Step one, create pain.

Step two, offer to remove pain.

Step three, demand tribute.

How can you use immigration policy in this way?

Well, immigration policy that's restrictive is painful.

for cities and states and companies and industries that rely on immigrants, right?

So you can imagine maybe some hospital or some city that's maybe struggling with population growth in 2026, 2027, going to Donald Trump and saying,

can you please change your immigration policy?

And then maybe he'll change immigration policy only if they offer him something in return.

So that's one way I think the politics of American stagnation could be quite interesting.

So do you think if this goes badly in the coming years, if people attribute a negative economic circumstance to these policies, that we could just have another shift and reverse some of what's happened in the past six months?

Yeah, I absolutely do.

You know, as I wrote in my piece, I think many Americans clearly did not like the era of mass immigration, record high immigration under Joe Biden, but I think they might hate the era of record deportations even more.

It's hard, I think, sometimes to really take the temperature of the median voter when it comes to immigration policy.

But if I had to do my best, I would say that the median American voter wants positive immigration that feels orderly.

And what happens is that immigration politics swings either too far to the left or too far to the right in a way that makes them continually punish whoever the incumbent is in power.

And right now, I think we have an immigration policy that is unjust, unfair, and incredibly disordered, at least if you're around a place where ICE members are knocking on doors and asking random people to show their papers.

Or if your name is Kilmar Obrego Garcia.

Indeed.

Derek Thompson, he's also got a podcast.

It's called Plain English.

Miles Bryan and Rebecca Ibarra made today explain today.

Amina Al Sadi edited Laura Bullard fact-checked and Matthew Billy and Andrea Kristen's Doctor Mixed.

And today's the last day I'll be saying Andrea's name on the show, at least for a while.

We call her Andy, by the way.

Andy's got a new gig.

She's sad to go and we'll be sad to lose her, but we are not mad at her.

In fact, we're happy for her and we're gonna miss her bye andy

support for this show comes from capital one With the Venture X business card from Capital One, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase.

Plus, the VentureX Business Card has no preset spending limit, so your purchasing power can adapt to meet your business needs.

Capital One.

What's in your wallet?