The opposition to President Donald Trump “must go to the mattresses to bring [deported migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia] home,” says a senior writer for NeverTrump Bill Kristol’s Bulwark media site.
“Bring. Him. Home. Our cause is here; our time is now,” author Jonathan Last declared on April 15, adding:
In an authoritarian regime, the opposition needs symbols and stories. [El Salvador illegal migrant] Kilmar Abrego Garcia is that symbol. His abduction in front of his autistic son and imprisonment in a foreign concentration camp is that story. All of the opposition’s energy should be focused on him.
…
An elected Democrat ought to be on the ground in El Salvador every minute of every day until Abrego Garcia is brought home … Congressional Democrats should do the job that Justice Department lawyers, in contravention of the Supreme Court, are refusing to do. They should take it upon themselves to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia.
Last’s call to rally around Abrego Garcia came shortly before the news broke that the illegal migrant who was ordered deported in 2019 reportedly beat his wife, was released by the FBI amid the apparent act of migrant smuggling, and faced evidence of being a street hustler for the dangerous MS-13 gang.
So far, there is little evidence that the top leaders in the Democratic Party want to handcuff their party to the political risk named Abrego Garcia, even as some Democrats rush forward to portray themselves as liberal saviors:
I've been in El Salvador all day fighting for the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 17, 2025
The Trump Admin can lie all they want, but the Court said they failed to show he was part of MS-13. This is about bringing home a man they ADMIT should've never been abducted. I won't rest until then. pic.twitter.com/ZNaaY4NQK3
But Last’s call also came years after Kristol helped Trump’s 2024 political victory by calling for the widespread replacement of Americans’ wanted children by new waves of foreign migrants.
In February 2017, Kristol, then editor-at-large of the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine, deemed Americans to be disposable and declared that population replacement via migration would be best for the elite’s exercise of national power around the globe:
Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? [I hope] this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse. You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever. Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico.
There is little evidence that Kristol ever supported a political compromise with the many millions of American voters who are damaged by the establishment’s ruthless economic policy of Extraction Migration.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and her children attend an interfaith prayer vigil for her husband Kilmar Abrego Garcia is held at the White House in Washington, D.C., April 14, 2025, during the visit of El Salvador’s president to the WH. (Astrid Riecken For The Washington Post via Getty)
Last seems unconcerned about Kristol’s call for the vast displacement of millions of Americans’ hoped-for children by migrants such as Abrego Garcia.
Instead, his empathy flows to the singular illegal migrant whose imprisonment in El Salvador “is not incarceration; it is liquidation.”Americans decided their democratic opposition to that migration policy in November 2024.
