Less than three days after Kilmar Abrego García was released from a Tennessee prison, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained the Maryland father and union worker during a check-in at the Baltimore field office Monday morning. The Trump administration has made clear its vindictive intention to deport Abrego García to Uganda, a country he has never been to and with which he has no connections.

On Monday afternoon, however, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis temporarily blocked the deportation, citing due process concerns and ordering that Abrego García be given a fair hearing before any removal can proceed.

Since March, the 30-year-old Abrego García has been subjected to public and private torture at the hands of the US government and its proxies. On March 12 he was violently arrested by immigration police. For three days he was shuttled through multiple facilities before he was illegally deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison.

Abrego García was one of approximately 150 people to be deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that grants the president virtually unchecked powers to deport foreign nationals of enemy states without due process. Before this past March, the act had only been invoked three times: the War of 1812, World War I and infamously during World War II to justify the internment of Japanese Americans and immigrants in concentration camps.

In CECOT, along with nearly 300 other detainees, Abrego García was beaten, assaulted, and denied both medical care and access to his attorneys. After four months of claiming it was powerless in the face of a massive public outcry, the government abruptly returned him to the United States on June 6 where the Trump administration unveiled fabricated “smuggling” charges that kept him imprisoned for months and are now wielded as a cudgel to force him to abandon his fight against deportation.

Holding back tears while speaking outside the ICE office in Baltimore with dozens of supporters and family members, including his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego García said, “Regardless of what happens today with ICE, promise me this: That you will keep fighting, praying, believing in dignity and freedom. Not only for me. For everyone.”

After Abrego Garcia was seized by ICE agents on Monday, his lawyer Simon Sandoval-Mosheberg declared: “There was no need for them to take him into ICE detention. He was already on electronic monitoring from the U.S. Marshals Service and basically on house arrest.

“We asked the ICE officer what the reason for his detention was. The ICE officer didn’t answer. The ICE officer stated that he will be taken to a detention center. We asked the ICE officer which detention center. The ICE officer said that they weren’t able to say.”

Speaking on the government’s plans to deport Abrego García to Uganda, Sandoval-Mosheberg said it was “preposterous that they would send him to Africa, to a country where he doesn’t even speak the language, a country with documented human rights violations, when there are so many other options.”

Abrego García’s lawyers revealed that the US government offered to deport Abrego García to Costa Rica, if he agreed to plead guilty to the manufactured “smuggling” charges.

“The fact that they’re holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick to coerce him is such clear evidence that they’re weaponizing the immigration system in a manner that is completely unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Mosheberg said Monday.

Abrego García is a union apprentice with the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) Local 100 in Maryland. While SMART bureaucrats and AFL-CIO President Liz Schuler have released statements of “support,” none of them has threatened strike action to protect Abrego García.

The union bureaucracies have refused to call strike action in response to Trump’s attacks on Abrego García and the democratic rights of the entire working class because it would immediately call into question the policies of the Democrats, who fully support ICE and “border security.”

SMART, like every AFL-CIO affiliate, is bound up with the Democratic Party. The union apparatus funnels dues money into Democratic campaigns and maintains its “seat at the table” by promising to contain and police the workers it purports to represent.

Confident in the collaboration of the Democrats and trade union bureaucracies, following Abrego García’s imprisonment, the fascist Trump administration doubled down on its lies Monday. The official White House X account tweeted out an image of Abrego García that smeared him as an “MS-13” gang member.

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Asked by a right-wing stooge during a press conference Monday to comment on the “MS-13 gangbanger,” Trump slandered Abrego García as “an animal” who “beat the hell out of his wife.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi added that Abrego García would “no longer terrorize our country.” “We’ve got him under control … the guy needs to be in prison. Not on the streets.”

Abrego García, unlike the president of the United States, has been convicted of exactly zero felonies. Trump, a serial con man, liar and fascist currently overseeing genocide in Gaza, has been convicted of 34 felonies.

Support for Trump and his fascist immigration policies remains well underwater in the United States. A July 2025 Reuters/Ipsos survey found Trump’s overall approval rating and approval on the issue of immigration both sat at 41 percent.

More recent national polling from University of Massachusetts Amherst found Trump’s overall approval down to 38 percent compared to 58 percent disapproval. The UMass Amherst poll likewise recorded only a 41 percent approval of Trump’s immigration operations, down from 50 percent just four months ago.

Over the weekend and on Monday, protests were held in Washington D.C. and throughout the country against Trump’s attacks on immigrants and plans to have the military occupy major US cities.

Hundreds protest in Tacoma demanding release of disabled US Army veteran

On Sunday, hundreds of people protested outside the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, to demand the release of Muhammad Zahid Chaudhry. According to family members, Chaudhry is a legal resident of the US and a disabled US Army veteran. His wife Melissa told local news outlets her husband was born in Pakistan but has lived in the US for the last 25 years.

Melissa told FOX13 her husband is active in the local “Veterans for Peace” chapter. Alex Scheel, a member of “About Face: Veterans Against the War,” told the outlet Zahid’s “detainment is totally unjustified. He was going to his regular appointments.”

ICE has yet to disclose why it detained Zahid Chaudhry.

In 2024, Zahid was interviewed by FOX13 during a memorial service for Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old Turkish American and University of Washington graduate who was murdered by the Israel Defense Forces while attending a protest in the West Bank.

At the September 2024 service for Eygi, Zahid recalled finding out she was murdered: “I couldn’t hold my tears yesterday, it’s Rachel Corrie all over again. Twenty-one years ago, it was Rachel Corrie.” Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist, was run down and killed by an Israeli armored bulldozer in 2003.

D.C. residents condemn kidnapping operations: “They are hard workers!”

In the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington D.C., Monday morning, at least seven masked federal agents and one US Parks police officer were recorded by local residents as they kidnapped three workers in a Z.M.H. Heating & Air Conditioning truck. Several outraged residents filmed the thugs as they kidnapped the workers.

Residents demanded the immigration agents show their faces and leave the workers alone.

“Hey, he’s going to fucking work. Get the fuck out of our city. Take the mask off, you fucking coward!” said one outraged resident, adding, “They are hard workers!”

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Over 200 protest plans for military immigrant camps in Indiana: “No Hoosier concentration camps”

Hundreds of people gathered in Johnson County, Indiana, Sunday afternoon to protest plans to transform Camp Atterbury into an ICE detention facility. The protest was organized by aspiring Democratic congressional candidate Brad Meyer, who argued the deportation operations were bad “strategically” and “economically.”

Signs carried by protesters did not mention economics but instead carried democratic slogans: “Immigrant Rights = Human Rights” “Abolish ICE” and “No Hoosier concentration camps.” (Hoosier is a nickname for residents of Indiana.)

In an interview with WTHR13, Julian Franklin, a current member of the National Guard, said he opposes not only the use of Camp Atterbury but all of ICE.

“When I enlisted, I swore to protect the country and the Constitution from threats foreign and domestic. ICE is that domestic threat.”