Pete Hegseth catches a stray as legal expert shoots down case against El Salvador man
April 17, 2025
A legal expert ripped apart the Trump administration's case against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who the government has admitted was removed illegally from the U.S. and sent to a notorious El Salvador prison.
Attorney general Pam Bondi insisted that Garcia, a Salvadoran national who was protected from deportation by an immigration judge in 2019, was "not coming back" to the U.S. despite court orders to facilitate his return and claimed the Maryland resident was a gang member, but legal expert Roger Parloff disputed her allegations on "CNN This Morning."
"What it really is, is a double hearsay, as we would say," said Parloff, a senior editor at Lawfare. "It's a detective who wasn't brought to court, never testified, saying what? Somebody allegedly told him, and that person is a confidential informant and we don't know anything about him. So it's double hearsay as to him [being a gang member]."
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"The only thing that the detective observed himself was he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and some sort of hoodie," Parloff added. "The hoodie had some sort of insignia that one of the officers called indicative of Hispanic gang culture, not even a particular gang, and so it all came down to the detective also said he spoke to some confidential informant who had been reliable in the past, and that person identified him as a high-ranking member of a MS-13, a clique called the Westerns. Just, that's right there in Brentwood, Long Island, and he's never lived in New York."
Abrego Garcia's attorney tried to track down the officer in 2019 case but was told he had been suspended, and the New Republic's Greg Sargent discovered that officer had actually been indicted and later pleaded guilty to giving confidential information about an unrelated case to a sex worker.
"So, in a way, like our whole portrait of him as described by the White House is, in fact, informed by somebody who was indicted for misconduct," said CNN's Audie Cornish.
The Department of Homeland Security also released court filings showing that Abergo Garcia's wife filed for a protective order in 2021 claiming her husband had punched and scratched her during a domestic dispute, which she told Newsweek had been done in an abundance of caution after being victimized by abuse in a previous relationship, but Parloff said those documents had never been provided to an immigration court.
"It had no bearing on any of his immigration proceedings, so far as I know," Parloff said. "It wasn't brought in at any of them. Obviously, you know, there's a lot of people in Congress that have these things like this out against them or, you know, [defense secretary] Pete Hegseth. He has no criminal record, not in this country, not in any country, so far as we know."
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