April 17: The Curious Case of Kilmar

FAA official worked for Iran; RFK links autism to toxins; SpaceX emerges as front-runner for Golden Dome

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The Big Story

In the maelstrom of rhetoric surrounding the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia—an El Salvadoran illegal migrant, Maryland sheet worker, and father of three now languishing in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center due to the Trump administration’s accusations that he’s an MS-13 member—three distinct camps of thought have emerged. Republicans argue there’s sufficient evidence tying Abrego Garcia to the gang, and even if there wasn’t, his illegal status alone justifies his removal. Democrats cry foul, asserting the MS-13 claims lack the heft to warrant deportation and decrying the administration’s brazen defiance of a federal judge’s order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Finally, there’s what might be called the “Greenwaldian” faction, which doesn’t oppose deporting illegal immigrants theoretically but does in this specific instance, due to what it sees as a trampling of due process and the rule of law in Abrego Garcia’s case.

These perspectives are illustrated in yesterday’s Piers Morgan Uncensored broadcast:

The stance heralded by Greenwald and others appears the easiest to dismiss. Greenwald took to X on April 15, 2025, declaring that deporting “Americans” is as “un-American” as it gets. Fine, except Abrego Garcia was never a legal U.S. citizen. He entered the country illegally around 2011. An immigration judge granted him a withholding of removal (WOR) order in 2019, which spared him from deportation to El Salvador and allowed him to work legally with a permit but did not confer citizenship.

For his deportation to be expedited in defiance of that 2019 order, the government would need ironclad justification, such as evidence of involvement with a designated terror organization like MS-13. Democrats argue the Trump administration has yet to produce such proof with convincing clarity. Until and unless the administration gets that evidence, Democrats say, this is the start of a “constitutional crisis”—an assertion being buttressed by the less hysterical, if still not factually accurate, critiques made by the Greenwaldians.

What the critics certainly do have right is that the administration’s messaging has been inconsistent. Attorney General Pam Bondi, appearing on Fox News with Jesse Watters on April 15, accused Democrats of being indifferent to the victims of crime. Other Republicans have leaned on Abrego Garcia’s documented history of violence to bolster their case, pointing to a 2021 civil restraining order filed by his wife, who accused him of “punching and scratching her, and leaving her bruised,” as reported by Newsweek. Garcia’s wife, however, recently expressed regret for filing that order, muddying Republicans’ narrative. Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance, sparring with reporter Zaid Jilani on X, seemed to shrug off concerns about due process, suggesting the sheer volume of migrants admitted under the Biden administration overwhelms the system’s capacity to handle each case meticulously.

It’s a pragmatic argument, but one that doesn’t legally excuse sidestepping the 2019 order. What could do so would be concrete evidence of Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 ties, or a change of country conditions (Abrego Garcia’s WOR could have been revoked in 2022, when El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele eliminated his country’s gang problem in one fell swoop), according to Andrew Arthur, a former federal immigration judge and a resident fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Those MS-13 ties, as it turns out, likely exist. Yesterday, Bondi released a Gang Field Interview Sheet from Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest that offered far more details about his alleged gang affiliations. Sporting gang-signifying apparel, he was detained alongside confirmed MS-13 members and was identified by a gang member who provided his rank and moniker within the organization. In a very interesting thread on X, Article III Project Senior Counsel Will Chamberlain explained how Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, managed to dupe a judge and the entire media about his client’s gang affiliation by omitting these details from his filed complaint.

More damning revelations followed. Also this week The Tennessee Star reported that in December 2022, a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer detained Abrego Garcia on suspicion of human trafficking while he was transporting seven individuals. The officer, noting Abrego Garcia’s presence on a terror watch list, contacted the FBI, only to be instructed to release him and his passengers within two hours.

These details raise a perplexing question: Why didn’t the Trump administration lead with this evidence, before Democratic outrage reached a boiling point? One lawyer, speaking anonymously to The Scroll, said the administration might be orchestrating a deliberate drip of incriminating details to maximize Democrats’ eventual humiliation once Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 status becomes irrefutable. “I’m now leaning toward the Trump administration making this case a media circus on purpose,” the lawyer said. “I can see [Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller having planned all of this in advance, including the slow drip of this information well after the court case.” Miller himself came forward Monday to dismiss the idea that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was a “mistake” as an “incorrect line” from a now-suspended U.S. attorney. “[Abrego Garcia] is El Salvadoran. He is an illegal alien. He was deported to El Salvador,” Miller told reporters.

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The Rest

→U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Edward R. Martin announced that a former contractor of the Federal Aviation Administration, 42-year-old Virginia resident and naturalized citizen Abouzar Rahmati, had pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of the Iranian government, according to a press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Rahmati was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government, from June 2009 to May 2010, says the New York Post. Court documents show that Rahmati worked with and on the behalf of Iranian intelligence operatives and government officials from December 2017 to June 2024. After offering his services to Iran in August 2017 through a former colleague who was a senior official in the Iranian regime, Rahmati agreed to provide Iranian officials with information about the U.S. solar industry. He faces a maximum penalty of up to 10 years in prison.

→Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a news conference Wednesday that the rising rates of autism in the United States could likely be attributed to “environmental toxins,” and vowed to identify the cause, declaring autism rates a “preventable crisis,” according to CNN. Kennedy was skeptical about the idea that increased rates of autism could simply be explained by “better diagnoses, better criteria, and changing diagnostic criteria,” arguing that something had changed in or around 1989—a claim that various smart observers of the space find convincing, even if they disagree with the secretary on how or why it happened:

→Truth Social of the Day

Yesterday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell claimed that the Federal Reserve needs to be patient about deciding to cut interest rates until we know what the tariffs’ long-term economic impacts will be. Today, Trump responded on Truth Social to lambast Powell for not cutting interest rates immediately and seemed to call for Powell to be fired.

→Elon Musk’s SpaceX and two partners have emerged as the front-runners to win a crucial part of President Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield, according to Reuters. SpaceX is partnering with software firm Palantir and drone builder Anduril to build key parts of the defense system. In the Jan. 27 “Golden Dome” executive order, Trump said a missile attack is “the most catastrophic threat facing the United States.”

→U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer “must embrace President Trump’s agenda” by repealing his country’s draconian hate speech law to get a new trade deal over the finish line, a White House official told The Independent on Wednesday. The information was provided after Vice President J.D. Vance told Unherd that the United Kingdom and the United States are close to coming to terms on a new trade deal. “The vice president expressing optimism [on a trade deal] is a way of putting further pressure on the U.K. over free speech,” said the official. “If a deal does not go through, it makes Labour look bad.”

→Despite requesting that a judge lower his bail from $1 million to $250,000 due to his financial hardship, 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony—charged with killing 17-year-old track star Austin Metcalf—used the $500,000 raised by supporters to fund renting a $900,000 home with his family, according to the New York Post. Multiple residents of the neighborhood expressed concern.

→Video of the Day

Here, New York Attorney General Letitia James responds in a Wednesday press conference to officials within the Federal Housing Financing Agency investigating allegations made by the Trump administration that she committed mortgage fraud. Per the New York Post, James listed a Virginia home more than 300 miles from her office in New York City as her “principal residence,” but neighbors told the outlet Wednesday that they had never seen her there. Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte detailed these and other allegations of James playing recklessly with residency requirements in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Despite James’ claims that she “fears no president,” her tone betrays a mild panic about the situation unfolding. What goes around comes around, indeed.

→President Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to address the skyrocketing cost of drugs in the United States by endorsing a pharmaceutical-industry-backed change to Medicare drug-price negotiations, fulfilling a campaign promise, Axios says. The order directs HHS to work with Congress to fix what the administration calls a “distortion” in the Medicare negotiation process for small-molecule drugs, and to reinstate a program from Trump’s first term to provide discounted insulin through federally qualified health centers. It calls on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch a pilot project to cover novel therapeutics and directs the Food and Drug Administration to streamline approval of generic and biosimilar drugs. While the order doesn’t address the “Most Favored Nation” policy, a hallmark of the first Trump administration that would have capped U.S. drug prices at the cost of what other countries pay (a policy that was blocked by the Biden administration), it still seeks to decrease the gap between what Americans pay for drugs and what people pay in other countries. One directive, The New York Times says, could possibly increase drug prices, however: It calls for the Trump administration to work with Congress to change a 2022 law that could possibly weaken a negotiation program implemented by the Biden administration to reduce Medicare’s spending on costly drugs.

→Justices of the U.K. Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a woman is defined by biological sex under the Equality Act, according to BBC. The ruling will have “major implications” for sex-based rights across England, Scotland, and Wales. The court sided with campaign group For Women Scotland, which brought a case against the Scottish government arguing that sex-based protections should apply only to people born with female sex. Judge Lord Hodge, as if anticipating the blowback from transgender-rights groups, said the ruling should not be interpreted as the triumph of one side of the debate over the other, and stressed that the law still offers protections to transgender people. The Scottish government argued in court that transgender people with a gender recognition certificate, which comes from a 2004 law that allows trans people to change their legal sex, are entitled to the same sex-based protections as biological women. Deciding on the proper interpretation of the 2010 Equality Act, Lord Hodge said the central question was how the words woman and sex are defined in the legislation, and the court ruled that womanhood should be defined by sex.

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