Americans are starting to learn who Maryland father Abrego Garcia really is

For a while, the favored moniker for Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the media was “Maryland father.”Abrego Garcia was indeed living in Maryland and was indeed a father, but this wasn’t what was most distinctive thing about him.There are hundreds of thousands of fathers living in the state who aren’t illegal immigrants and don’t have ties to criminal gangs. Abrego Garcia, of course, is the man who was mistakenly deported to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador despite a judge’s order that he couldn’t be deported there. Instead of quickly asking for Abrego Garcia to be sent back to the United States, the Trump administration dug in its heels and suffered repeated legal setbacks, including at the Supreme Court.Sensing political opportunity and appalled at the notion of someone living in the US being sent, based on no criminal charges, to perhaps the most inhumane prison in the Western Hemisphere, Democrats made Abrego Garcia a cause.They inevitably downplayed the drip-drip evidence that he was an unsympathetic character. It emerged that he had been picked up by local police in 2019 at a Home Depot years ago and the cops suspected that he and his associates were gang members.It emerged that his wife accused him of abusing her.It emerged that he’d been stopped in Tennessee in suspicious circumstances in 2022 with multiple men in the vehicle.Whether Abrego Garcia was a good guy or a reprobate, a member of MS-13 or of his church choir, had no bearing on whether he should have been imprisoned in El Salvador with our active support.The answer to that was “no” regardless, but now that the Trump administration has brought him back to the United States and filed charges against him, the “Maryland father” description has been exposed as ludicrously inapt.According to a Department of Justice indictment, Abrego Garcia routinely engaged in human smuggling, transporting illegal aliens within the United States on more than 100 occasions. The facts set out i...