One would think that four years of the Biden administration’s unlawful immigration policies that imported millions of illegal aliens — hundreds of thousands of them hardened criminals — and then President Donald Trump’s crushing victory on November 5 would have taught the Democratic Party a lesson: This is a losing issue for them. Let Trump close the border and deport illegals. That’s what Americans want. Alas and alack, expecting that lesson to sink in appears to be the triumph of hope over experience: They haven’t just refused to moderate their defense of illegal aliens and illegal immigration, they have intensified it. On the one hand, Democratic lawmakers rallied to the cause of illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador. Federal authorities say Garcia is a member of the MS-13 terror gang, and court records say he is a vicious, wife-beating goon. Led by far-left Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Democrats hurried off to El Salvador to push the government there to release Garcia. It refused.

On the other hand, and not to be outdone, two judges, one in Wisconsin and one in New Mexico, helped two illegal aliens commit crimes. Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan helped an illegal alien try to escape arrest from federal agents who showed up outside her courtroom, where the illegal was in a hearing in connection with a brutal assault. Magistrate Judge Jose Cano and his wife harbored an illegal alien and Tren de Aragua terror gang suspect in their home in Las Cruces and destroyed evidence. The two judges and Cano’s wife face serious federal charges.

These revelations invite the observation that something is terribly wrong with a political party that defends such individuals, and, indeed, even harbors them. And, worse still, lies about immigration law.

Background: Deportation, Court Ruling

The absurd contretemps over Salvadoran Garcia, who jumped the border when he was 16 in 2012, began when a Justice Department lawyer admitted in a court filing that he was mistakenly deported when immigration authorities sent him to El Salvador on March 15. That falsehood led a federal judge — appointed by President Barack Obama, of course — to order his return. The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 that the administration must “facilitate” Garcia’s return.

While far-left Democrats and their Mainstream Media Megaphone claimed the Trump administration lost the case, during a meeting between President Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trump aide Stephen Miller explained that the ruling was a victory for the administration. “This has been portrayed wrong for 72 hours in the media,” Miller noted:

[The court] said the most a court could ever compel you to do would be to facilitate return, which would basically mean if El Salvador voluntarily sends him back we wouldn’t block him at the airport. We would put him back into ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention and then he would be deported either back to El Salvador or somewhere else.

Amusingly, even a legal eagle for hate-Trump CNN agreed with Miller. He disclosed that the Justice Department lawyer who wrongly said the deportation was mistaken was suspended. And though Garcia supposedly had a “withholding order” that stayed his final order of deportation, it was invalid because of his MS-13 membership, Miller explained. Tough luck for Kilmar.

During the same meeting, Bukele said that he would not return Garcia to the United States because he would not release a terrorist. “The question is preposterous,” the hard-as-nails president said. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” And even if he did, again, Garcia would be rearrested and deported, a point that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reiterated. “There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again,” she told Murphy during a Senate committee hearing. If he were to come back, we would immediately deport him again because he is a terrorist, he’s a human smuggler, and he is a wife-beater.”

There followed the 76 Democrat Trombones in the Big Parade to El Salvador, led by Senator Van Hollen. The band’s blaring horns bellowed so loudly they nearly drowned out the truth about Garcia, his gang membership, and the protective orders his wife sought. About the only thing that junket did was validate the famous statement from far-left Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut: Illegal aliens are “the people we care about most.”

Poster boy: The Trump administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, on March 15. The administration says Garcia is a wife beater and MS-13 terror gang member. Far-left Democrats have been pushing the administration to return him to the United States. (Public Domain)

Abrego Garcia, Gang Member

While the administration argued from the first that Garcia, now 29, was an MS-13 terrorist, police and court records from Tennessee and Maryland quickly proved it, despite Democrats’ arguments to the contrary.

The Volunteer State’s contribution to the story is a traffic stop in November 2022, when the Highway Patrol pulled over Garcia for speeding and failing to maintain his lane. Inside the 2001 black Chevy Suburban he was driving were eight passengers. Garcia confessed that his license was suspended, police body camera footage showed.

Fox News published the footage and what a patrolman said:

“How many rows have you got in here? Four seats? Four rows of seats?” a state trooper can be heard saying. “Did y’all put an extra one in? Huh? Did yall put another one in? No? They come like this? I’ve never seen one with that many seats in it.”

“He’s hauling these people for money,” one state trooper said.

Garcia was holding $1,400 in cash. His passengers did not have identification, and, significantly, had no luggage. “And if you get them out … [they’ll have] toothpaste and toothbrushes in their pocket. I guarantee it,” a patrolman said. And when the cops checked Garcia’s name in the National Crime Information Center, a source told Fox, they received a hit. He was a gang and/or terror suspect.

That fact is significant and validates what Just the News reported before the bodycam footage was released. “Abrego Garcia was flagged in 2022 by the Biden administration as a ‘suspect alien’ who was possibly involved in ‘human smuggling/trafficking’ after a traffic stop in Tennessee raised the suspicions of a state trooper, according to internal Homeland Security documents,” the website reported.

Garcia told troopers that he was transporting the passengers from Texas to Maryland for “construction work.” But significantly, the owner of the truck was convicted human smuggler and illegal alien Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, the website learned:

Abrego Garcia told the state trooper that the owner was his boss. However, that SUV was flagged separately by the Homeland Security Investigations [HSI] Baltimore field office as belonging to a target they suspected of human trafficking or smuggling, the documents show. 

“Vehicle is used by HSI Baltimore target in human smuggling/trafficking operation. Vehicle makes trips to southern border to pick up non-citizens,” the record reads. The memo says the Baltimore HSI case agent should be notified if the vehicle is encountered. 

Just the News also drilled into Reyes’ record, and found out that he had been transporting seven illegals, three of them previously deported, “from their home base of Houston, Texas, to different locations throughout the United States.” Mississippi cops stopped him, and he landed an 18-month prison sentence for smuggling illegals. Better yet, Hernandez-Reyes confessed to federal investigators, sources told ABC News, that Garcia worked for him transporting illegals.

That fact segues to documents from the Prince George’s County, Maryland, police department, which finger Garcia as an MS-13 terror gang member. Released by U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, the documents show that Garcia “was validated as a member” of MS-13. His gang rank was “Chequeo”; his street name “Chele.” (A chequeo, or “check,” the BBC reported, is not a rank but a name for a new recruit.) Whatever the name implies, county cops “validated” Garcia’s gang membership. 

The fingers on Garcia’s left hand bear tattoos that are coded MS-13 symbols. During testimony on April 30 to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation to become head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terrance Cole authenticated the tattoos with a photo that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) produced. 

“Based on your time and experience and expertise in the DEA, what does that photo or those markings suggest to you?” Graham asked. 

Cole: “Well, they suggest that he’s an MS-13 member — that those are his markings. That’s his brand.” 

Graham walked Cole through the tattoos’ coded MS-13 symbols. 

Graham: “So based on your time as a DEA agent in the field, particularly in Mexico, these tattoos are consistent with MS-13 associations?”

Cole: “Yes sir, that’s correct.”

One more piece of evidence that Garcia is MS-13 came in a court plea for an emergency custody hearing from Edwin Trejo Ramos, the former husband of Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and the father of Sura’s children. Fearing for his children’s lives, Ramos alleged in the petition that Sura “is dating a gang member.” 

Abrego Garcia, Wife Beater

Piled atop the positive identification of Garcia as an MS-13 terror gang member, the Ramos allegation opens discussion of Sura, who raised almost $300,000 on GoFundMe with a tearful tale about her family’s travails after the feds sent her husband packing.

“Kilmar is a loving father, husband, son, brother, union construction co-worker,” the plea says, who “has been wrongfully disappeared and deported, torn from his family due to a shocking administrative error by the US government.” The tale from Sura compounded that falsehood:

Kilmar is an excellent father. He has always been there for our three children and all of their needs. Two of them are on the autism spectrum (ages five and nine), and our third has epilepsy (age 10). Kilmar has been the main provider of our household and the love of my life for over seven years. Since our family has been separated, I have been devastated and confused. I lost my life partner, my children lost their father, and all of our family, neighbors, co-workers, and friends have been devastated due to this unjust family separation.

Total raised before the fundraiser closed: $265,916.

That’s quite the stack of cash to raise using a big lie. Garcia is not an “excellent father,” as Sura claimed, and the idea that he is a “loving husband,” as the plea averred, is beyond preposterous. Sura’s own court filings prove quite the opposite. Twice she petitioned the Prince George’s County Circuit Court to protect her from Garcia. In the first report, August 2020, Sura described a brutal beating that left her bruised. 

Poster boy: The Trump administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal alien from El Salvador, on March 15. The administration says Garcia is a wife beater and MS-13 terror gang member. Far-left Democrats have been pushing the administration to return him to the United States. (AP Images)

In a disjointed written account, Sura complained that Garcia took her phone, then demanded her car keys at 1:00 a.m. She refused, and told the raging thug that she wanted to use the car, an answer that infuriated him. Sura said she “went upstairs to make food for my kids but he turned off the stove and told me I wasn’t going to cook anything for him until I gave him” the keys. Garcia locked her children in the basement, she alleged. Retrieving a phone from her car, she alleged, she called 911.

“I try to return inside but he locked all doors,” she continued. “After 5 min waiting for police, he opened the door and told me to give him the keys. I again try to make food for my kids because I could hear them crying [and] screaming.”

When cops arrived, Sura “opened the door and yelled for help. When my husband heard he grabbed me back inside & slapped me,” she alleged:

Police came he acted violent with him & broke my phone in front of [the] officer. This is not the 1st time. It been a couple of occasion he takes my phone, and car, & I’m left without [being] able to call anyone.

Sura wrote that she has photos “of all the bruises [he’s] left on my body,” and the household goods Garcia destroyed. “Me & my kids are afraid now,” she wrote:

[He’s] kicked me, pushed me, slapped me in the face. Threaten me, I also have a record[ing] that he told my ex-mother-in-law that even [if] he kills me no one can do anything to him.

So the man who told a third party that he could murder his wife and get away with it is, we are expected to believe, a “loving father and husband.”

The visit by cops didn’t stop the abuse.

In May 2021, Sura reported that Garcia whacked her with a work boot in November 2020, and before that, in August 2020, landed a crack that left her with a purple shiner. But that wasn’t all. On May 4, “I was watching on my laptop, and he yelled to turn it off, I told him I wasn’t sleepy, he got angry, reached over shut and threw my laptop on the floor, and the baby started to cry because he was putting pressure on him,” she wrote on May 5 in the domestic abuse complaint:

My [immediate] reaction was to push him off of us, and then he punched, scratched me on my left eye, leaving me bleeding.

Later that day, the distraught Sura reported, an angry Garcia ripped off her clothes. He chased her as she fled to the bathroom. Garcia grabbed her arm, she alleged. “I have marks on my left arm as well,” she wrote. “I’m afraid to be close to him. I have multiple photos/videos of how [violent] he can be and all the bruises he has left me.”

After the two written complaints went public, USA Today published audio, apparently from Sura’s August 2020 plea to a judge to stop Garcia. She told the judge that she skipped a previous hearing because Garcia’s family “washed my brain.” His father was ill, they said, and poor Kilmar mustn’t undergo the ordeal of a domestic abuse indictment. 

“I have a lot of police reports,” she told the judge. During the incident described in the written petition, she escaped to get outside the home and call police.

“They took a long time to get to the house,” she said:

It was probably like 20, 30 minutes. So I saw a neighbor walking his dog and I opened the door, and I was, like, “help,” and then, when [Garcia] heard me, like, he grabbed me … and he slapped me, and then the neighbor, like, he didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know what to react. I have pictures of the evidence, like all the bruises.… Even on Wednesday, he hit me, like, around, like, 3 in the morning, he would just wake up and, like, hit me. And then last Saturday … before I went to my daughter’s birthday party, he slapped me three times. And then last week, I did call the police. My sister called the police because he hit me in front of my sister.

Confronted by Garcia’s shills in the mainstream media, Sura had a ready explanation for the reports, most notably the audio. After all, she had convinced who knows how many well-meaning people to contribute more than $260,000 to her cause. “Recently an audio clip of a civil court hearing related to the protection order I filed became public,” she told USA Today:

I previously acknowledged the protection order and will again address a personal and painful part of mine and Kilmar’s life. Neither of us were in a good place at that time. 

My husband was traumatized from the time he spent in ICE detention and we were in the throes of COVID. Like many couples, we were caring for our children with barely enough to get by. All of those factors contributed to the actions which caused me to seek the protective order.

Upshot: Being an illegal alien is quite the stressor. Poor Kilmar couldn’t help but beat the daylights out of his wife and threaten to murder her. It was ICE’s fault.

Publicity stunt? Far-left Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is leading a crusade to return deported illegal alien Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has said he will not release Garcia, who is credibly accused of being a wife beater, illegal-alien smuggler, and MS-13 terror gang member. (AP Images)

The Two Judges

So that’s the man whom Van Hollen and the Democrats expect the Trump administration to return “home” to Maryland. Of course, he is home — in El Salvador. But at least one or more of those Democrats didn’t try — not that we should put it past them — to help Garcia escape arrest by federal immigration authorities, or, worse, provide room and board and unlawful access to high-powered firearms.

That’s what Democratic judges Hannah Dugan and Jose Cano did for other illegals.

Now suspended from the circuit court in Milwaukee, Dugan very possibly ended her career not only as a judge but also as a lawyer when she helped a Mexican illegal, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, escape from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other agents on April 18. Flores-Ruiz was in court to answer charges that he brutally assaulted two people.

ICE, the FBI, and Drug Enforcement Administration agents showed up at the courthouse to arrest the Mexican illegal. Then Dugan “became visibly angry, commented that the situation was ‘absurd,’ left the bench, and entered chambers,” the criminal complaint alleges. “At the time, Flores-Ruiz was seated in the gallery of the courtroom.”

Dugan angrily confronted an ICE agent, whom she ordered out of the courthouse. When the agent said he was there to make a lawful arrest on an administration warrant, Dugan told him he needed a “judicial warrant” and must see the circuit court’s chief judge.

But Dugan wasn’t finished. She apparently lost her marbles and lost touch with reality — or at least the reality that helping an illegal alien escape arrest is a federal crime. “Multiple witnesses have described their observations after Judge Dugan returned to her courtroom after directing members of the arrest team to the Chief Judge’s office,” the criminal complaint alleges:

For example, the courtroom deputy recalled that upon the courtroom deputy’s return to the courtroom, defense counsel for Flores-Ruiz was talking to the clerk, and Flores-Ruiz was seated in the jury box, rather than in the gallery. The courtroom deputy believed that counsel and the clerk were having an off-the-record conversation to pick the next court date. Defense counsel and Flores-Ruiz then walked toward each other and toward the public courtroom exit. The courtroom deputy then saw Judge Dugan get up and heard Judge Dugan say something like “Wait, come with me.”

Despite having been advised of the administrative warrant for the arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Judge Dugan then escorted Flores-Ruiz and his counsel out of the courtroom through the “jury door,” which leads to a nonpublic area of the courthouse.…

Judge Dugan commanded Flores-Ruiz’s attorney and [Flores-Ruiz] to leave through a backdoor of the courtroom.… [A witness] saw Judge Dugan escort Flores-Ruiz’s attorney and [Flores-Ruiz] through a non-public door near the courtroom’s jury box. Shortly thereafter, Judge Dugan came back to the courtroom and conducted hearings on that morning’s docket.

Flores-Ruiz wasn’t in court to answer a minor crime, such as having a speeding ticket or being drunk in public. He was charged with an assault in which he punched someone 30 times, then clobbered a woman who tried to stop the beating. Dugan’s helping Flores-Ruiz to flee, of course, required the federal authorities to find him to arrest him.

The complaint alleges that Dugan broke two laws: 18 U.S. Code 1505, and 18 U.S. Code 1071. The first crime, felony obstruction, carries a five-year stretch in prison; the second, misdemeanor concealing an individual, is punishable by one to five years in prison.

Speaking to Fox News, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi described Dugan more harshly and colorfully than the FBI’s measured account. Dugan was “furious, visibly shaken, upset,” Bondi said. Then she helped the Mexican skedaddle.

Yet as bad as Dugan’s actions were, Cano’s were likely the more dangerous to public safety.

The legal perils for Jose and Nancy Cano began in March when immigration authorities arrested Tren de Aragua terror suspect Cristhian Ortega-Lopez at Cano’s home. Photos and video on social media depicted Ortega-Lopez with multiple weapons, including “a Sig Sauer P365 handgun, an AR-15 rifle equipped with a suppressor, and other high-powered firearms and ammunition,” the Justice Department alleged:

Distinctive tattoos confirmed Ortega-Lopez’s identity in the photos and videos. Further review of his social media activity revealed content suggesting affiliation with Tren de Aragua, including gang-related tattoos, hand gestures, and clothing.

In January, a tipster told HSI that Ortega-Lopez and other illegals were living at a property in Las Cruces, New Mexico, owned by Cano and his wife, Nancy. In February, HSI searched the premises. They bagged Ortega-Lopez with “multiple associates” and seized four firearms.

Agents also seized three cellphones. Told he could make a phone call, the terror suspect told agents that the phone he wanted to use wasn’t among the three. “Video calls ... later showed Nancy Cano holding a black iPhone believed to be Ortega’s fourth phone,” Justice alleges:

In a March 7 call with Ortega-Lopez, Nancy Cano used the device to contact a person named “Michelle” via WhatsApp, then facilitated a FaceTime conversation between Michelle and Ortega-Lopez using her personal phone. Additionally, in an April 20 call, Nancy Cano and Ortega-Lopez discussed deleting his Facebook account — a platform where he had previously shared incriminating content, including gang affiliations and images with firearms.

On April 24, HSI agents executed a subsequent search warrant at the Cano residence to locate the missing cellphone. During questioning, Jose Cano admitted to destroying Ortega’s cellphone by smashing it with a hammer approximately five weeks prior, believing it contained incriminating photos and videos of Ortega with firearms.

Forensic analysis of the recovered phones revealed messages linked to Ortega’s criminal activities, including affiliations with the Tren de Aragua gang and images of Ortega with firearms.

The Canos could land 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted of evidence tampering and conspiracy to tamper with evidence.

During the same interview with Fox News in which she discussed Dugan, Bondi offered details about Cano’s destruction of evidence and the images on one of Ortega-Lopez’s phones. After smashing the phone with a hammer, Cano “walked the pieces to a city dumpster to dispose of it and to protect him.” As for Ortega-Lopez, “this TdA member … had on a necklace that said ‘kill,’ something about death, [and] he had tattoos all over him,” Bondi explained:

He also had on his cell phone pictures of two decapitated victims. Two victims, decapitated. Gruesome photos. And he was sending them out. And whoever he was sending them to was sending back saying “hey, you need to be careful. You shouldn’t be sending these. You shouldn’t be texting these photos out.”

Bondi also said the judge and his wife gave Ortega-Lopez a rifle that he fitted with a suppressor and used at a firing range.

Where Do These People Come From?

Reports of Democrats trying to return a deported terror gang member to the United States, tampering with evidence to protect another, and helping an illegal alien escape arrest by federal authorities sound impossible to believe, and they would be in normal times. But these aren’t normal times.

For four years, the Biden administration aided and abetted an invasion of illegal aliens across the Southwest border of the United States. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agents caught and released millions of “migrants,” some of whom raped and murdered women. Even “migrants” on the FBI’s terror watch list were caught and released. Millions of the “migrants” were military-age young men, including upwards of 40,000 from China. In February last year, the appalling abandonment of border security prompted 10 former FBI agents to warn top members of Congress that Biden had set the stage for what could be a major terror attack or attacks. “These men are potential operators in what appears to be an accelerated and strategic penetration, a soft invasion, designed to gain internal access to a country that cannot be invaded militarily in order to inflict catastrophic damage if and when enemies deem it necessary,” the officials wrote.

In September, ICE delivered a terrifying report to GOP U.S. Representative Tony Gonzales of Texas. As of July 21, 2024 ICE reported, “there were 662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket, which includes those detained by ICE, and on the agency’s non-detained docket. Of those, 435,719 are convicted criminals, and 226,847 have pending criminal charges.” That group included 13,099 convicted murderers and 25,272 convicted rapists and other sex criminals.

Top Democrats not only think nothing of these data, but also insist that crossing the border illegally is not a crime. That is, of course, false. But despite having been repeatedly educated on the subject by border czar Tom Homan, they mulishly insist they are right.

“They continue to say things like ‘the illegals’ and that they broke the law coming in,” Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said on MSNBC, the party’s propaganda arm:

But what they are not telling the American people is that it is a civil violation. It is not a criminal violation to enter the country illegally.… It’s not a crime. Which is why they’re so frustrated, because they really want our local law enforcement to go out and round up people, when they could be looking out for the murderers and sexual abusers, as well as the robbers. They want them to go and round people up on civil accusations.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said the same thing during a committee hearing, which invited Homan’s correction. Even worse, she employed an illegal alien on her congressional staff, a federal crime under 18 U.S. Code 1324.

Thus, neither the Democrats’ defense of Garcia nor the judges’ crimes in aiding and abetting an illegal alien’s escape or harboring a gang member and providing him with firearms is a surprise. The party no longer cares about the rule of law, and its loyalty lies not with the United States. In an honest age, that would be called treason.