Jennifer Vasquez Sura, whose husband Kilmar Abrego Garcia was incorrectly deported by ICE, speaks during a press conference ahead of Garcia’s hearing. Photo by Getty Images

There’s a terrifying precedent for the predicament of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — the incorrectly deported man whom President Donald Trump’s administration is refusing to return to the United States — to be found in Vichy France. And it explains precisely why Trump is so determined to avoid bringing Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., in defiance of a judicial ruling.

In 1942, Marie Reille, a French Catholic, was deported to Auschwitz by mistake amid the Vichy government’s collaboration with the occupying Nazi regime. Today, we may say that everyone sent to Auschwitz was wrongfully deported, but under the law back then, the deportation of Jews was considered lawful — itself an illustration of how unkindly history can look on injustices justified as licit and even necessary at the time. But the deportation of a non-Jew, who was not a member of the French resistance, was considered a mistake.

Unlike Abrego Garcia, Reille was given a hearing before being deported. Still, a sub-sub-prefect, Pierre Garat, ruled that she was Jewish and ordered her transportation to Drancy, a transfer camp for persons ultimately destined for Auschwitz. And unlike Abrego Garcia, Reille escaped before her deportation could be completed. On her way to Drancy, she threw an unstamped letter to her husband onto the streets of Paris from a moving prison bus. Amazingly, her husband eventually received the letter, and was able to convince higher Vichy officials that she was Catholic, and her deportation was in error.

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By that time, she was in a boxcar on her way to Auschwitz. She arrived, and standing on that death camp’s infamous railroad platform, surrounded by armed guards, barking dogs and the overpowering stench of burnt bodies, she was identified, put under German guard, and escorted back to Bordeaux.

Upon her return, Reille went back to the offices of the Bordeaux prefecture where her hearing had been conducted, to inform Garat and his office that he had sent her to a “deathcamp, an extermination camp.” Many decades later, in 1998, Garat’s administrative superior, Maurice Papon, was put on trial in Bordeaux for crimes against humanity, specifically for signing the deportation orders for 1,560 Jews, most of whom ended up in Auschwitz.

Reille was already deceased, but her daughter-in-law, Yvette Silva, testified against Papon at his trial and told her mother-in-law’s story, which was evidence that Papon knew very well the fate of the deportees — despite his defense that he merely signed orders and had no idea where the people he deported ended up, or what was happening at Auschwitz.

And in Reille and Silva’s testimony is the key to understanding why Trump’s administration is desperate to keep Abrego Garcia from returning to the U.S., despite the Department of Homeland Security’s admission that he was the victim of an “administrative error.” And it helps explain, too, why El Salvador’s president, on a Monday visit to the White House, announced that he too would take no steps to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

Abrego Garcia, a husband and father of three who has been in the U.S. since 2011, and whom a judge ruled in 2019 could not be deported to his home country of El Salvador because of threats to his life, did not receive due process or a hearing before being locked away in an infamous El Salvador prison known as the Center for Terrorism Confinement. While the prison is notorious for its inhumane conditions, the U.S. has struck a deal to pay the Salvadoran government $6 million this year to enable the incarceration of prisoners like Abrego Garcia.

There are only two conceivable reasons for the U.S. government, rather than taking every step possible to return Abrego Garcia after discovering its error, to instead be defying court orders to facilitate his return immediately. First is that the administration is intent on establishing unprecedentedly broad powers, including by attempting to diminish the effective abilities of the judiciary. And second, and more simply, is that the idea of Abrego Garcia returning home and sharing details of his surely horrifying experience at the prison poses an immense threat.

Because the administration officials know that whatever Abrego Garcia might report would not only risk raising already heightened public outrage over mass deportations, conducted with minimal justification and in possible defiance of the judiciary. It could pose a risk to them, personally.

At the end of his trial in 1998, Papon, then 87 years old, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was found guilty of complicity in the arrests and detentions of some of the named Jewish victims. (He was not found guilty of murder, probably because while it was proven that he knew that the deportees would die, he did not have the requisite intent to kill them. He ultimately served less than 3 years of his sentence and died in 2007.)

No Trump official wants to end up in Papon’s shoes. Their insistence on ensuring Abrego Garcia does not return to the U.S. should be seen as a glaring admission that they understand their conduct is of the kind that history could hold against them, with possible material consequences for their well-being.

Finally, it must be said that if the U.S. is funding something like a concentration camp in El Salvador, and if the administration is eager to cover that up, it is incumbent on the courts, including the Supreme Court, to not be complicit in any such cover-up. That should be a further incentive for the judiciary to expedite in any way possible Abrego Garcia’s release — despite the administration’s efforts to stop them.

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