A federal judge dismissed the criminal indictment against Kilmar Abrego García this week, ruling the charges inadmissible in a case that has become one of the most closely watched tests of executive detention authority in the Trump era. Abrego García, a Salvadoran national who had lived in Maryland for years, was deported in early 2025 to El Salvador’s Cecot prison — a maximum-security facility that has become a symbol of the Bukele government’s mass incarceration strategy — despite a court order protecting him from removal. His case reached the Supreme Court, generated congressional hearings, and became a touchstone in debates about whether the executive branch could simply disregard judicial orders it found inconvenient. The dismissal of the criminal charges is a procedural win for his legal team, though his path to return to the United States remains far from clear.
The received wisdom
The progressive and civil libertarian framing treats this as a story of heroic institutional resistance. Courts functioning as they should, checking executive overreach, vindicating an individual whose rights were trampled by an immigration enforcement apparatus running on political adrenaline rather than legal process. Abrego García, on this telling, represents the thousands of others swept up in mass deportation operations conducted with insufficient regard for individual case merits, court protections, or the basic dignity owed to people who have lived in America for years or decades. The dismissal is welcome but insufficient — it does not address the underlying administrative machinery, does not secure his return, and does not compensate him for imprisonment in one of the Western Hemisphere’s harshest detention facilities.
A different read
The right-of-centre reading here requires some care, because the Abrego García case is genuinely not an easy one for anyone who believes in limited government and the rule of law. The rule of law argument cuts both ways: it requires enforcing immigration law, but it also requires that executive agencies not defy judicial orders. An administration that ignores court rulings it dislikes is not enforcing the law — it is asserting that its preferred policy outcomes supersede judicial oversight, which is a fundamentally different and more dangerous claim.
The Guardian’s reporting on the dismissal noted the judge found the charges procedurally defective, while NPR’s coverage documented the wider context — the case has become a proxy battle over whether federal courts retain meaningful authority to constrain immigration enforcement operations.
The conservative case for due process in immigration is underappreciated but real. Edmund Burke’s conservatism was never a defence of arbitrary executive power; it was a defence of settled law as the accumulated wisdom of generations against both revolutionary innovation and arbitrary sovereignty. When an administration dismisses a court-ordered protection and ships someone to a foreign prison without trial, it is not being Burkean — it is being Bonapartist. The distinction matters enormously if you believe that the same legal machinery that could be used against undocumented Salvadorans today could be turned against citizens tomorrow under a different administration.
None of this requires agreeing with every immigration policy preference of the progressive left. Reasonable people can hold that enforcement of immigration law is necessary, that border security matters, and that deportation orders should be carried out — while also holding that individual court orders must be respected, that prosecutorial discretion requires some minimum of evidentiary care, and that the US government should not be imprisoning people in foreign facilities after defying judicial orders. These positions are not in contradiction; they are, in fact, the classical conservative position on state power: robust but lawful.
The deeper issue the case surfaces is the Trump administration’s theory of executive authority in immigration specifically: that case-by-case judicial review is itself an obstacle to policy rather than a constitutional feature of government. That theory, if sustained through executive action and eventual Supreme Court deference, would represent a significant and durable shift in the balance of power — one that future administrations of any ideological stripe would be able to exploit. Conservatives who are comfortable with it now might consider how they would feel about it in the hands of the next progressive president.
What to watch
Watch the Supreme Court’s handling of related immigration authority cases over the next term — the Abrego García litigation has surfaced core questions about federal court jurisdiction over immigration enforcement that the justices will eventually have to answer with more than emergency orders. Watch also whether the dismissal of criminal charges creates any political leverage for Abrego García’s lawyers to negotiate his return; the administration has thus far resisted any movement on that front. Finally, watch congressional Republicans: a small number have expressed discomfort with the administration’s most aggressive deportation-court confrontations. Whether any of them translate that discomfort into legislative action is the real test.
— J