The buzziest moment from President Donald Trump’s interview with ABC News yesterday was a baffling exchange with the reporter Terry Moran over whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man erroneously deported from Maryland to El Salvador, has tattoos reading MS-13 on his knuckles. (He does not, though Trump once flashed a picture with a label purporting to decode his tattoos as a symbol of gang affiliation. In the interview, telling whether Trump actually believed that the supposed decoding was real or whether he was just trolling was impossible.) The real news on this topic, however, was Trump’s acknowledgment that he could bring Abrego Garcia home if he wanted.

That Abrego Garcia is still in El Salvador and in the headlines today, a month after my colleague Nick Miroff first reported his removal, is both astonishing and outrageous. Abrego Garcia’s case has become so large a story, however, that it does threaten to overshadow something else important: the more than 250 other men deported from the United States and now at the notorious CECOT prison, from which Abrego Garcia was recently moved. The facts of Abrego Garcia’s situation are unusually clear, despite the White House’s efforts to muddy the waters. He was under a judicial order to not be deported, and the administration has admitted that his removal was a mistake. But the justified anger about his situation should not lead observers to forget the dangerous nature of the other cases.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the executive branch from sending Venezuelan migrants in North Texas who are accused of being gang members to El Salvador without first providing them due process. (The justices are expected to hear arguments on the case soon.) The CECOT prisoners, most of whom are Venezuelan, are in an awful bind: They were deported to a country that is not their own without any chance to challenge their detention, and without any clear process for getting out of prison there. Indeed, the Salvadoran justice minister has boasted that no one leaves CECOT. Yet even Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the most ruthless leader in the hemisphere this side of Daniel Ortega, was initially skittish about taking the deportees, and demanded evidence that they were really gang members, according to a new New York Times report. The Trump administration scrambled to do that, but much of what it came up with doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

The more details that emerge about other individuals, the more egregious stories we learn. For example, a judge in another case last week ordered the administration to take steps to return a man, known in filings only as Cristian, who was deported despite being in the midst of an asylum request—in violation of an agreement the Biden administration had struck not to deport young asylum seekers. The judge, a Trump appointee, was scathing: “Defendants have provided no evidence, or even any specific allegations, as to how Cristian, or any other Class Member, poses a threat to public safety.”

The New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg tells the story of Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled Venezuela, citing anti-gay persecution. He tried to enter the United States, was arrested and sent to Mexico, but then followed the rules: He made an asylum appointment and passed a preliminary screening. Yet he was sent to a detention facility after the government questionably flagged his tattoos as possible gang signs. Now he’s stuck in El Salvador, and Democratic members of Congress—who have visited and met with Abrego Garcia—have been unable to see him.

The executive branch continues to try to dodge both the law and what courts have ordered it to do. Talking Points Memo reports that the men are now Schrödinger’s detainees—not clearly in the custody of the U.S., which arrested them and is paying El Salvador to house them, nor in the custody of El Salvador, which has no obvious authority to hold them. The legal scholar Ryan Goodman notes that the executive branch claims in another case that it didn’t have to follow a court order barring the departments of Justice and Homeland Security from deporting some people, because—aha!—they transferred the detainees to Defense Department planes for final delivery to El Salvador. Goodman doesn’t believe that this passes legal tests, and it certainly doesn’t pass the test of basic logic.

This insulting legal cutesiness was always the plan. The Trump administration understood that the deportations it was undertaking were legally dubious, and it sought to get around legal protections by whatever means it could. If the people who are getting arrested are really the cold-blooded criminals the executive branch insists they are, saying so in a court of law should be relatively easy, and the reluctance to even try implies otherwise. The White House can’t uphold “law and order” by discarding it in the cases of these detainees. The rule of law demands justice for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—and for many others too.

Related:

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Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

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Today’s News

1. A federal judge ruled that Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student activist and legal permanent resident, should be immediately released from detention.
2. The Supreme Court appeared open to allowing Oklahoma to use federal funding to run the first religious charter school in America, which would be influenced by Catholic doctrine.
3. A week after a deadly terrorist attack in Kashmir, which India blames on Pakistani-backed militants, a Pakistani official claimed at midnight that India is planning an attack within the next 36 hours.

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Evening Read

What Parents of Boys Should Know

By Joshua Coleman

Apparently, I cried a lot as a child. I don’t know if I cried a lot compared with other boys. But for whatever reason, my parents nicknamed me Tiny Tears, after the American Character doll that shed faux tears when her stomach was pressed. I hated the label, because the message was clear: Crying was not only a problem but akin to being a baby—worse, a baby girl.

Read the full article.

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Shop around. The “generic” grocery-store brand is no longer terrible—in fact, it’s often the draw, Ellen Cushing writes.

Read. Lower Than the Angels, by the scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch, challenges the Church’s reputation on sex, Grace Byron writes.

Play our daily crossword.

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P.S.

One strange effect of writing a book about Project 2025 is that now I see its influence everywhere I look. Aggressive immigration enforcement is an obvious connection, but today’s Supreme Court arguments on religious public schools? Also related. House Republicans seeking Medicaid cuts? Yep. Attacks on sanctuary cities? You guessed it. I’ve been doing a bunch of interviews related to the book, including on yesterday’s Fresh Air, which was a life goal. If you’re in the D.C. area, mark your calendars for May 27, when I’ll be chatting about the book with Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg at Politics & Prose at the Wharf. I’d love to say hello.

— David

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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