The matter concerns a Salvadoran man who has spent years in Maryland with an American wife and children, a man who crossed into the United States illegally and now finds himself at the mercy—one might almost say at the punch line—of a deportation machine. Authorities are pressing to send Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda, after offering a farcical “deal” that would have him plead guilty to human smuggling and serve time in Costa Rica. The catch, of course, is that the prison clause was the hinge; he reportedly rejected it, and whether that Costa Rica option has ever truly been withdrawn remains murky. This little melodrama sits squarely in the broader, tiresome debate over the Trump era’s deportation procedures and due process, a debate that, in truth, has all the elegance of a hastily stapled memo.

And yet the plot thickens: Ábrego García was deported to El Salvador in March, despite protections and a legal tangle that ended with his return to the United States in June—an “administrative error,” we are told. He then lingered in a Tennessee facility on charges of unlawful transport of migrants, with a trial slated for January. Now, on August 23, 2025, officials told his lawyers that he must report for deportation to Uganda on Monday; the lawyers declined to confirm whether the Costa Rica option has indeed been withdrawn. A tidy little sequence, is it not? A perfect example of modern governance: law as stagecraft, policy as prop, and the human story as collateral.

From my seat of privilege, the spectacle is both infuriating and depressingly predictable. The republic treats borders with the gravity a duchess reserves for dinner invitations—a matter of form, not of humane consideration. We hear of deals offered late on a Thursday, as if the timing absolves a policy from scrutiny; we hear of “administrative errors” as if they were mere clerical misdrops in a grand ledger. And we are meant to applaud the expediency, or at least pretend that the spectacle serves some higher principle. If one wishes to perform speed and decisiveness, one should not pretend to be adjudicating a life, a family, a future. The system’s competence is never more evident than when it clears a desk by clearing a person.

The man’s wife, his children, their ordinary domestic life—these are the quiet casualties of a process that can pivot from release to expulsion on a whim and then revert to a different whim without so much as a courtesy consult. The Costa Rica offer, if it existed in any meaningful form, reads as a cruel bait-and-switch designed to appear pragmatic while signaling that the value of due process is as debatable as the price of a New York loft. The Uganda option, equally, feels less like a policy choice than a political solvent, poured to dissolve the murky blend of guilt, punishment, and border theatrics.

If the governance of nations is to resemble anything resembling order, one would hope for continuity, for a respectability of procedure that does not crumble at the first whiff of controversy. Instead, we have a chain of negotiations that treats a man’s life like a negotiable instrument—handed off, revalued, and sometimes discarded as if it were merely a misfiled memo in a very large, very fragile cabinet. I suppose the only thing more tiresome than the inevitability of this melodrama is the belief that it is anything other than a performance in which the powerful pretend to solve problems while the less fortunate bear the costs.