Whistleblower Emails Expose Fresh Trump Abuses in Abrego Garcia Case

“Can we say the following?” Percival asked, then listed several things he’d like the administration to say about Abrego Garcia, one being: “This guy is a leader of MS-13.”

“If we can get a declaration to that effect, yes,” Reuveni answered. This meant the assertion could not be made without a facts-and-evidence-based declaration from ICE on Abrego Garcia’s status.

In other words, top DHS officials apparently were pushing to characterize Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 “leader” before any evidence of this had appeared. And Reuveni expressly warned against doing this absent such evidence.

Subsequently in that chain, an ICE official (whose name is redacted) answered Percival’s question about whether it’s OK to call Abrego Garcia an MS-13 “leader.”

“I have not found anything indicating ‘leader,’ but I’ll keep looking,” the ICE official wrote, meaning that the hunt for such evidence would continue.

It never materialized. That ICE official did identify Abrego Garcia as a “verified member” of MS-13, based on a formal declaration which at this point had been provided by ICE.

But this too would ultimately prove to be lacking in evidence. That claim was based on a ruling by a judge early in the 2019 proceedings to deport him (resulting in him receiving protected status) after he’d been arrested in Maryland the first time and transferred to ICE.

But that ruling rested on “double hearsay,” on paperwork filed by a Maryland cop after Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest that cited an unnamed confidential source, and neither the cop nor the source were cross-examined. The cop was subsequently suspended and indicted for serious professional misconduct on an unrelated case.

None of this stopped top administration officials and Trump himself from continuing to recklessly call Abrego Garcia a gang member and a terrorist too many times to count. Vice President JD Vance even described Abrego Garcia as a “high-level gang member in MS-13,” long after these internal emails showed the administration knew it had no evidence for the “leader” claim.

Here’s Percival’s original email, courtesy of a document supplied by Durbin’s office:

Here’s Reuveni’s response to Percival:

And this is from the unnamed ICE official’s response to Percival (the “declaration” is the aforementioned ICE statement on Abrego Garcia’s status from top ICE official Robert Cerna):

Note that in the March 31 email, Percival also asked whether it was OK to assert that Abrego Garcia was not “in immediate danger” in CECOT. As Durbin’s office notes, this sought permission to make the “unsupported” assertion that Abrego Garcia was safe in the Salvadoran prison without “assurances” to that effect. Indeed, the emails show Reuveni prodding other officials for guarantees of Abrego Garcia’s safety and getting little back.