How absurd US immigration laws let Kilmar Abrego Garcia game the system

Kilmar Abrego Garcia shouldn’t be in a prison in El Salvador, but he also never should have been in the United States — or given relief from deportation.The White House is trying to make the alleged MS-13 gang member a symbol of illegal-immigrant crime, while Trump’s opposition is seeking to make “the Maryland man” a symbol of the administration’s disregard for due process.What has gotten less attention is that his case is an example of the self-defeating absurdities of our immigration system and, in particular, how it hands out “humanitarian protection.”When Abrego Garcia avoided deportation back in 2019, he didn’t take advantage of asylum — which has been a key driver of the immigration crisis — but something called “withholding of removal.”Whereas a grant of asylum greases the path to US citizenship, a withholding of removal just prevents a deportable alien from being removed to a particular country — in Abrego Garcia’s case, El Salvador.Abrego Garcia was born in 1995 in El Salvador and came to the United States in 2012, when he was 16 years old.He lived here illegally until he was picked up by the police in 2019, and put into deportation proceedings.To avoid getting removed, Abrego Garcia made an asylum claim, sought relief under the Convention against Torture, and applied for a withholding of removal.An immigration judge didn’t grant him asylum (he hadn’t applied, as required, within his first year of coming here) and ruled that Abrego Garcia hadn’t established that he’d be tortured upon return to El Salvador.The judge did, however, grant the withholding of removal, on unconvincing grounds.Abrego Garcia claimed that his mother had run a pupusa business — a national dish in El Salvador — out of the family’s home and that a gang, Barrio 18, began extorting and threatening the family.The threats included a warning that the gang would take Kilmar, then around 12 years old, if the payments didn’t continue.Assuming that ...