Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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much for your support. I want to welcome to the show.
Will Chamberlain. Will is the senior counsel at the Article
three Project, also with the Internet Accountability Project. Will, how
are you, sir?
Speaker 2: Doing great? Pe good to be with you.
Speaker 1: Good, Thanks for making time for us. I appreciate it.
First off, what is the Article three Project? Real quick?
Speaker 2: We're a legal and political additty organization. We work the
on behalf of the Trump administration or not not for them,
but we worked to push you know, we were working
to get Trump cabinet officials confirmed. We fight again. We
fought against all the warfare against President Trump. We worked
to get Judah nominees confirmed. And we also file things
like judicial ethics complaints in various places when judges violate
their responsibilities.
Speaker 1: So I wanted to have you on today to talk
about Kilmer, Armatto, Abrago Garcia the quote Maryland father as
he is referred to in the Atlantic piece about him,
because he got deported back to El Salvador and this
was the guy that was or wasn't I don't know
in MS thirteen. So first let's kind of walk through,
like who was this or who is this guy?
Speaker 2: So, I mean, it's unclear whether he was m S thirteen.
I think more likely than not, but there wasn't, you know,
a full criminal trial on that question. I mean, the
real simple thing that we know is he was an
illegal alien who crossed into the United States in twenty twelve.
He was finally detained by Ice in twenty nineteen, he
was going to be removed, and then he made this
claim for asylum. And this claim for asylum he claimed
that somehow, like you know, he was pushed out of
the country or forced to leave because the threats to
his mother's papoosa business in El Salvador. And eight years
later those threats were still so severe that he couldn't
return and he needed to make a claim like this
because otherwise he was going to be forced to leave
the country because he's an illegal alien who never fixed
his legal status. But he obviously wanted to stay because
he had like a you know, a fiance and a
kid on the way. But even so, I mean, it's just,
you know, one of the funny thing is, you know,
the story here is like this guy didn't get enough
to process. It's like, if you actually understand what this
guy's story is, it's clear that he got far too
much to process that he should have. You know, he's
been able to stay in the country illegally for well
over a decade and he should go home, and now
he is home.
Speaker 1: So the yeah, the argument that his lawyer made was
that he cannot go back to El Salvador because of
an organization called the Eighteenth Street Gang, which I'm pretty
I'm going to go out on a limb and say,
I bet I know where to find these guys. But
the Eighteenth Street Gang was targeting him and threatening him
with death because of his family's business, this poopoosa business,
which I was not aware of. How dangerous papoosa making.
If that's what, I don't even know, what do you
even know what a papoosa is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like a Salvador and it's like a it's
like a sandwich. Not even no, it's like a tortilla.
Stuff tortilla with cheese.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, well now all right, now I'm on board.
Speaker 2: No, so okay, all right.
Speaker 1: So so the family business though this was eight years
ago that right, This was that this gang was targeting
his family. Is that a reason enough why he would
be tortured or targeted by going home now?
Speaker 2: No? And in particular it's because in the interim, I mean,
Nayabukele has become the president of El Salvador and has
crushed the gangs. I mean, the entire theory that this
guy's a forward. It was kind of ridiculous at the time,
but even so, the theory was he's going to get
persecuted and killed by this gang. All the gang members
are in jail now, so he can go home, right.
El Salvador is now a safe country to return to.
Speaker 1: So could the administration terminate the because he asked for asylum? Right,
that's the deal he had. He went in there and
he asked for asylum. I guess we did he get
it from immigrations.
Speaker 2: He didn't Okay, he didn't because the rule is, which
is a very sensible rule, if you don't apply for
asylum within one year of crossing the border, you are
barred from claiming asylum. What he got was this thing
called a withholding of removal, and all that means is
you are still a removable illegal alien. You just can't
be removed to a specific country. You have to be
removed somewhere else.
Speaker 1: And that's where the administration now admits that they messed
up by sending him back to the country that was
identified as the one that they shouldn't send him back to.
Speaker 2: Correct But I think people need to understand the term
harmless error, right because in reality, the circumstances that were
the cause of this inability to remove him are gone,
meaning this gang is no longer a threat to the guy.
If the administration had just gone through the normal channels,
went to the court and said, hey, to withdraw this
guy's withholding our removal because El Salvador is safe, they
would have been able to remove him anyway. So I mean, like,
there's no injustice here, is what I'm saying. I mean,
there's a procedural due process flaw, but the outcome here.
If the administration had followed due process would have been
exactly the same. This guy would have gone home.
Speaker 1: Let me go back to the MS thirteen connection and
you rode in a Twitter thread. I still call them
that the finding that he was a member of MS
thirteen only came up because he asked for bond, So
why would it only come up? And then what happened?
But why would it only come up when he asks
for bond? And then what happened with the disposition of that.
Speaker 2: Well, so he got detained not because he was a
member of MS thirteen, but because he was an illegal
alien in the country illegally. So I mean that's sufficient
to justify a removal, you don't. I mean we're sort
of in this weird space of the Democrats keep asking well,
what crime did they commit. It's like, well, they're in
the country illegally. They don't have a right to be here.
So that was the circumstance he was in. Now, this
guy was going to be detained until pending his removal,
and he wanted to fight that, and so he asked
for a bond. The bonds are usually not given in
these cases, but you can ask for it, and so
then the question is, okay, well, if we're going to
give you bond, are you a danger to the community.
And then that's where the question of this guy's MS
thirteen membership came up, and the judge found that there
was evidence that he was a member of m S
thirteen and therefore that he could not establish that he
was not a threat to the community, and so bond
was denied.
Speaker 1: And then there was also the question of a flight risk, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, right, the fact the idea that you know, because
this guy was likely to be removed and had failed
to appear in regard to some of his traffic violations.
The original immigration judge all the way back in twenty
nineteen said, yeah, we think that's another independent reason why
we're going to deny you bond.
Speaker 1: So then that's when I guess a little bit later
he shifts the arguments or his tactic in trying to
stay right. That's when he then tries the asylum claim.
Speaker 2: Exactly right, he applied for this asylum and withholding a
lost an asylum managed, but he did get his withholding
of removal. Managed to persuade the judge that his sob
story about his mom's papoosa business was true, and so
that meant that he couldn't be removed to El Salvador.
But I mean, apparently there was just not no ability
to get him removed somewhere else. And then moreover it
the Biden administration didn't bother sort of challenging that withholding
you know, once even once it was clear that El
Salvador was now a safe country.
Speaker 1: Also, the Papoosa business, it's not even in business anymore, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was. It wasn't even in business back in
twenty nineteen when he was making this claim about fearing persecution.
Speaker 1: Well, all right, but aside from that, So then there
is there's an argument. I re read a piece over
at the New Republic and they say that he did
have the legal right to be here and he's not
a convicted MS thirteen gang member. What do you say to.
Speaker 2: That, Well, the first part is false. He did not
have the legal right to be here. He could have
been removed instantly to any other country in the world.
So that's just out out falls. The second claim is
that he's not a convicted gang member. Yes, he was
never a prosecuted There was no need to prosecute the guy.
He was a detained illegal alien. Right. We weren't thinking
about trying to put him in an American prison for
crimes he committed here. We were going to send him
back to El Salvador because that's where he's a citizen
of and he never had got a legal right to
be in the United States.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Will Chamberlain, he's the senior counselor at the Article
three project. You can follow him on Twitter, Will Chamberlain
and Will I appreciate the time, sir, thanks so much.
Speaker 2: All right, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I man, all right, if you're listening to this show,
you know I try to keep up with all sorts
of current events, and I know you do too, And
you've probably heard me say get your news from multiple sources.
Why Well, because it's how you detect media bias, which
is why I've been so impressed with ground News. It's
an app and it's a website, and it combines news
from around the world in one place so you can
compare coverage and verify information. You can check it out
at check dot ground dot news slash Pete. I put
the link in the podcast description too. I started using
ground News a few months ago, and more recently chose
to work with them as an affiliate because it lets
me see clearly how stories get covered and by whom.
The blind spot feature shows you which stories get ignored
by the left and the right. See for yourself. Check
dot Ground dot News slash pete. Subscribe through that link
and you'll get fifteen percent off any subscription. I use
the Vantage plan to get unlimited access to every feature.
Your subscription then not only helps my podcast, but it
also supports Ground News as they make the media landscape
more transparent. David Strom, writing at hotair dot com about
the Maryland father who may or may not have been
an MS thirteen gang member, says the Trump administration has
conceded that an administrative error resulted in a man being
deported to El Salvador when he should not have been.
Not that he should not have been deported, mind you,
Just as we heard from Will Chamberlain. There not the
basketball player. This guy's a lawyer. But as Will said,
it's not that he shouldn't have been deported, he should
have been. He was in the country illegally. He has
been in the country illegally for more than a decade.
He had plenty of opportunity to try to get himself
right with the immigration rules and such. But he did not,
and on the occasion when he was brought before an
immigration judge, it did not go well for him. So
it's not that he should not have been deported. The
question is to which country. And the only thing that
the man had won Abrego Garcia or Garcia. The only
thing that Garcia had won was this limited holding that
said you can't send him back to El Salvador. It
was a withholding. He was granted a withholding of removal
to El Salvador. That's it. And so the administration sending
him back to his home country of El Salvador, that
was the incorrect thing to have done. Now, I think
at this point everybody knows my opinion of gov CO.
I don't trust the government to do really much of
anything well, okay, and if it does perform adequately, that
is usually sufficient for me to say, Okay, I'm not
going to die on that hill. I'm not gonna yeah,
I'm not going to make a big deal about it
because you performed bare minimum adequate, you know. But even
I understand, or maybe because of that, I understand that
GOVC is not going to get everything right. Nobody does,
no organization does. You can't. It is an impossibility. That's
why the constitution allows for amendments, right, because the founders
recognize they're not going to get everything right. And if
the document is to survive for the long term, then
you have to have the ability to correct mistakes that
may be made unwittingly or wittingly. So and so the
government is going to make mistakes. They imprison people false
you know, with false charges or incorrect charges. They got
the wrong guy. We have likely executed people in America.
We have probably, I mean, the chances are like virtually
one hundred percent that governments around this country have executed
innocent people. Okay, that most assuredly has happened. Which is also,
by the way, why I am opposed to the death penalty,
because that, like you, there's no coming back from that.
You've deprived somebody of their life, You've murdered them, and
they didn't do the thing that you convicted them on. Right,
But convictions are made in error. Right, People make mistakes,
Government agencies make mistakes. That is not a reason to
say that all of this needs to be unwound, though,
or that we can't deport anybody and that somehow or another,
this guy needs to be brought back to America. That's
what the left is arguing for, that he needs to
be returned to America. But he's not a legal resident here.
He wasn't here legally. Now, if you want to argue,
like a logically consistent standard would be that, okay, we
sent him to the wrong place. It's his home country,
so maybe we pay for a flight to take him
from his home country to some other country that'll take him.
Like that would be a logically consistent argument to make.
But that's not the argument they're making. They're saying, bring
him back here. But he was here illegally. Such a
mistake should not be downplayed, says David Strom. The system
broke down and something that it's something that should not
have happened. But the claim that he was some poor
innocent father who was hurting nobody and was casually ripped
off the streets and sent to a torture camp for
no reason is complete and utter. Bs. The Atlantic wrote
that in Monday's court filing or the original piece I
should say, came from the Atlantic, And what Strom says
is that the court filing that was yesterday or sorry,
day before yesterday. Attorneys for the government admitted that the
Salvadoran man Garcia had been deported accidentally. Quote. Although Ice
was aware of his protection from removal to L Salvador,
Garcia was removed to L. Salvador because of an administrative error.
According to the government. In the court filing, he had
received protected legal state from an immigration judge. He is
asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask
for his return and to withhold payment to the Salvadoran
government for the use of all of the jail space.
Like we're apparently paying Al Salvador six million dollars a
year to jail all of these deportees, and Al Salvador
asked they made the offer, like, yeah, we'll take them
because El Salvador has been cracking down on their violent
gangs and criminal cartels down there, So we're paying them
for the jail space. And so what the lawyers for
this guy are saying, you need to withhold payment for
all of the deportees down there, withhold the payment to
L Salvador for housing all of these prisoners until we
get this one guy back, who, by the way, is
an El Salvadoran national he was still here quote legally
because he made the claim that if he was deported
back to l Salvador, he might face torture. After all,
gang members do actually torture other gang members, so he
has a legitimate fear he would have done the same
to his rival gang members. So his fear is probably
pretty rational. Again, if he was actually MS thirteen, which
was never proven in court, but the judge said, yeah,
there's enough evidence to conclude that he may have been.
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The man is an illegal migrant from El Salvador. In
twenty nineteen, ice presented sufficient evidence that he was a
member of the MS thirteen gang for an immigration judge
to deny him bond and order him removed twenty nineteen,
six years ago. Garcia was ordered to be removed six
years ago, after he had been in the country for
almost as long. He then filed an asylum claim and
obtained a withholding of removal order under the Convention against Torture. Essentially,
he argued that despite his being here illegally and likely
being a gang member based on the previous finding that
he could be tortured if he was sent back to
El Salvador, such an order could still allow the government
to deport him, but not to his home country, at
least not without first contesting the order, and he has
been using that order since twenty nineteen to avoid deportation.
It does not change that the Trump administration, emphasizing government
and competence, screwed up by deporting him to the country
that he wasn't supposed to be deported back to based
on that twenty nineteen order. This highlights the need for
checks in the program, says David stromat hotair dot com.
So again, he was eligible for deportation. The issue in
question is what country he could be deported too. That's
the question. The helly and says, uh, but pete, no,
hang on second, I just lost it here it is
but pete, see, their legal right to be here is
them being alive. Don't you understand that that's that's the standard.
Speaker 2: To do.
Speaker 1: This is from Paul. His name's all capitalized, So I
feel like he's yelling, do you not vet your guest speakers? Okay,
I don't have guest speakers on the program. I have guests,
and yes I do. I find out who they are.
I've known and followed Will Chamberlain actually for a long
time years and the Article three project. I'm aware of
what they do. Sometimes I ask those questions about like
what is the Article three project about? To let you
know what the Article three project is about, and you
can arrive at different conclusions Paul about what Will outlined
I gave you, and you can go to my prep
sheet and you can see the link to his analysis
of the case. He put it all out there on Twitter.
He's got the screen grabs of the court orders and
the documents from the Immigration court to explain all of
the stuff that he outlines in his analysis. So back
to Paul's email, do you not vet your guest speakers?
Will Chamberlain said multiple times the salvendoran immigrant is home. Now,
I'm all for deportation, but he isn't home. He is
in Seacot prison, which if you don't know what a
papoosa is, I'm sure you don't know the type of
prison that is, I am aware of the kind of
prison that is. It's for terrorists, that's what it was
in gang members, that's what they built it for. Like
it can house forty thousand in mates. It's massive, and
I think they're only at like fourteen thousand right now,
but it could hold up to forty thousand. And you know,
the anti incarceration folks around the globe are very upset
about the conditions and the way people are imprisoned there
and all of that. Will Chamberlain saying that he was
sent home, meaning he was sent back to his home country. Now,
if El Salvador would like to release the guy, because
he's not an MS thirteen gang member, and they've got
no records of him ever participating in any kind of
gang activity, that kind of stuff, okay, But he was
ordered to be deported and he was only supposed to
not go back to El Salvador, which is why I said,
a logically consistent response would be something like, okay, well
send him to another country, and what that other country
does with that person. We cannot control everybody, and they
do not have a right to be here. He entered
the country illegally. He's not allowed to be here. He
was not supposed to be here. So, yeah, they messed up,
and they sent him to El Salvador. So you want
to try to get him out of that place and
send him someplace else. Okay, I'm open to trying to
do that if you want to try to adhere to
that immigration court's ruling on that narrow scope. But the
idea that somehow or another he shouldn't have been deported
at all, I don't find that argument to be persuasive
in the least. Paul's email continues, But ultimately that is
where Ice messed up, not in deporting him but sending
him to the most strict prison in the world. No,
they messed up by sending him to that country, by
sending him back to El Salvador. That's where the immigration
order said, you can't send him back to his home country.
And so when Will Chamberlain was saying back home, he's
talking about the home country. So I think you're hearing
maybe something that you want to hear. But that's how
Will was saying, is that they sent him back home
to his home country. Again, the finding that he was
a member of MS thirteen came up in the court,
in the immigration court because Garcia had asked for bond okay,
because they found that he had crossed the border illegally
in twenty twelve, and he was therefore removable. That is
a totally independent question of whether or not then whether
or not he was in MS thirteen. Right, you have
two specific data points there. Number one, did he come
here illegally? And number two is he MS thirteen or
was he Two separate things, And the first one really
is the only one that matters. He was removable, and
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Call our News Foundation reporting the Trump administration says that
it is a broken record. Sorry, it has broken a record. Sorry, yeah,
that's my fault. It's broken a record for all time
lowest border encounters in a single month. That marks a
dramatic turnaround from the monthly border encounters experienced under the
Biden White House, Which is weird. If I thought we
couldn't do anything unless we got that bad border bill passed.
Border patrol agents counted roughly see hundred eighty crossings, so
seventy one eighty crossings along the US Mexico border during
the month of March, according to data that was released
yesterday by Customs and Border Protection. This figure comes in
sharp contrast to the monthly average of one hundred and
fifty five thousand border crossings. Yeah, from that's over the
previous four years, the average daily border crossings was fivey
one hundred. Okay, so you had fifty one hundred per
day under Biden and you have seventy two hundred in
one month under Trump. Daily southern border apprehensions have now
dropped to around two hundred thirty each day. So every
day along the border they apprehend two hundred and thirty people.
That is the lowest in recorded US history. Do you
remember was it Mitt Romney who made the comment about
self deportation and everybody lost their minds And I never
understood why, because that is simply stating fact that people
will respond to incentives. It is a completely rational, logical
thing to do. And so if it becomes too difficult
to enter, people cease trying to enter. If it becomes
too difficult to stay, people will not stay. Those are
the incentives. You make it an unattractive thing for people
to do, then they won't do it as much. The
incredible turnaround follows Donald Trump's overhaul of the immigration enforcement
system since re entering the White House in January his
administration declared an emergency that allowed more resources, including the military,
to be diverted to the border. The administration also successfully
coerced the Mexican and Canadian governments to beef up their
own border security, and it scrapped a popularly used asylum
app and prioritized border wall construction. But you don't even
hear much about that anymore, do you. The border wall.
I haven't seen any real reporting on that since Trump
got in. I'm not saying there hasn't been. I'm just
saying I haven't seen it. And I followed the news
pretty closely, and I haven't seen anything. There's not been
any kind of outrage at you know, the construction of
the wall going on. In all of this. I did
see stories that they scrapped the app and replaced it
with the CBP one app I think is what it
was called, which made it super easy for hundreds of
thousands of people to come in and claim asylum under
the you know, the multiple choice questions that they were asked,
and then you know, the people coming in were coached
by their coyotes who would say, you know, say yes, yes, no, no,
or whatever on the four questions, and then you would
get it, you would get the asylum, and you would
get a court date for like eight years from now,
and you were golden. It was a system constructed to
flood the country. That's why they made it so easy.
The Trump White House has also heavily leaned into interior
enforcement detaining and deporting criminal illegal migrants n mass across
the country, resulting in many illegal migrants too discouraged to
even try their chances at illegal entry at the US
Mexico border. I've said this for the last twenty years.
That's how long we have been arguing over It's actually longer.
That's how long I've been arguing in this debate my
entire adult life, basically when illegal immigration exploded about twenty
years ago. And I have always said that it is
a rational thing for people in other countries, if they
want a better life, it's a rational thing for them
to pick up and even make that kind of long
tread trek into America across the southern border. That is
the rational choice to make when the American government doesn't
care to enforce its own immigration law. Right if you can, like,
if you can get across the border, you can probably
end up staying for a very very very long time,
have kids here, they become citizens. You can then tether
yourself to those kids and then bring in other family
members through the chain migration process. So it's a rational
thing for these families to do. I understand that. But
at some point the juice is not worth the squeeze, right,
At some point the risk of making that treacherous journey
and then getting caught and sent back home. When you
believe that that is a more than likely outcome, then
you're not going to make the trip in the first place, which,
by the way, can save those people's lives and spare
some of those people from being assaulted along the way.
Sanctuary jurisdictions across the country and other areas inundated with
illegal migrants, once overrun by the national border crisis, have
steadily begun closing many of their migrant shelters. With so
few illegal migrants coming in, local leaders said the cost
of running the shelters is no longer justified. The dramatic
changes at the southern border also sharply contrast from a
prevailing narrative during the twenty twenty four presidential question with
election rather in which many Democrat opponents of Trump claimed
that the Biden's bad border bill deal was needed to
address the illegal immigration crisis. The changes currently happening at
the border have largely resulted from administrative changes by Trump.
No new congressional action was needed. It never was. It
never was. It's just a matter of will to enforce
the law. All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening. I could not do
the show without your support and the support of the
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