Great Replacement Theory Leads To A Great Replacement of Facts
Kilmar Abrego Garcia fled a criminal gang in El Salvador that terrorized his family for years, threatening to kill him. A conservative Trump-appointed judge said so in a 2019 court ruling that explicitly prohibited his deportation to El Salvador — which the Trump administration didn’t appeal.
So, he’s the exact opposite of what Trump, his administration and allies have painted him as — including with badly photo-shopped images Trump promoted on his social media site. Like so many others, he’s a victim fleeing gang violence, not a perpetrator spreading it.
Trump’s big-lie narrative of foreign governments sending criminals to invade the U.S. with the complicity of Democrats and liberal elites is a form of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, arguably the most central big lie in Trump era conservatism. Once a fringe belief of white supremacist conspiracy theorists, repeated in a series of mass-murder manifestos, it was mainstreamed on Fox News by Trump confidant Tucker Carlson. A 2022 New York Times investigation found that he “amplified the idea that Democratic politicians and others want to force demographic change through immigration” in more than 400 episodes.
Other lies and conspiracy theories can be woven into it, such as voter fraud claims that millions of undocumented immigrants are voting, or welfare abuse claims that immigrants are bankrupting programs. But Trump’s favorite focus is on crime — despite the well-established fact that immigrant crime rates are lower than those of native-born Americans. All the versions are based on lies, so why not stress the one that scares and angers people the most?
But Garcia’s story shows just how false the narrative is.
We’re a nation of immigrants who always come seeking a better life — sometimes fleeing hardship, and sometimes something much darker: violence and fear of death. Garcia’s story may be recent, but the story itself is centuries old.
His mother, Cecilia, made and sold pupusas (tortilla-like griddle cakes) from home, a business that became so successful the whole family was involved. That success drew attention from the Barrio 18 gang, which extorted the family, physically threatening Kilmar, threatening to rape his sisters and kill his brother Cesar. The gang demanded weekly payments, but offered to stop if Cesar joined the gang. Instead, he fled to America and became a citizen.
The gang’s attention then shifted to Kilmar, who eventually, at 16, fled to America as well, where he met his future wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, an American citizen. His story was summed up in the 2019 court ruling cited above.
He’s now a Maryland sheet-metal apprentice, and at the building trades federation’s recent legislative conference, President Sean McGarvey issued a ringing demand for his return.
“We need to make our voices heard,” McGarvey said. “We’re not red, we’re not blue, we’re the building trades; the backbone of America. You want to build a five billion dollar data center? Want more six-figure careers with healthcare, retirement, and no college debt? You don’t call Elon Musk! You call us!
“And yeah, that means all of us. All of us! Including our brother, SMART apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who we demand to be returned to us and his family now! Bring him home!”
On April 10, the Supreme Court ruled Garcia’s removal illegal, saying the Trump administration had to “facilitate” his return. But Trump responded with double-talk and multiple lies, even claiming the court had ruled in his favor, and that he was powerless to bring Garcia back — a lie matched by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who likewise pretended helplessness.
So, on April 16, Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen went to El Salvador to check on Garcia’s well-being and highlight the issue. After first being denied a meeting, he met with Garcia the following day.
“This is about safeguarding the constitutional rights of everyone living in the United States,” Van Hollen said on his return to the U.S. He promised that although his visit was the first, it wouldn’t be the last. And just four days later, a delegation of four House Democrats — including Long Beach Rep. Robert Garcia — arrived in El Salvador to bring further pressure.
“Kidnapping immigrants and deporting them without due process is not how we do things in America,” Rep. Garcia said in a press statement. “We are demanding the Trump Administration abide by the Supreme Court decision and give Kilmar and the other migrants mistakenly sent to El Salvador due process in the United States.”
Recently, the public has increasingly turned against Trump. Polls by both the Washington Post and the Associated Press show his approval at just 39%. Approval for his immigration policies have also fallen, but remain his strongest suit, at 46% in both — largely because cases like Garcia’s may have started to register, but aren’t yet seen as typical, and the impact of the Great Replacement big lie remains strong.
In the Post poll, 42% say Garcia should be brought back, vs. 26% who say he should remain imprisoned abroad. So specific support for Trump’s immigration policy is 20 points lower in this case.
Protecting Children
But Garcia’s case is hardly an outlier. A growing number of cases show the breadth of cruelty and absurdity that result from this big lie. On April 25 came word of cases involving the most vulnerable victims as well as the most powerful.
In the first instance, three U.S. citizen children, ages 2, 4 and 7, were kidnapped and sent to Mexico with their mothers. The 4-year-old has stage 4 cancer and was deported without medication or medical contact. ICE agents refused to let the mothers speak with attorneys or their husbands, so they could not make an informed decision, much less a freely-chosen one. It was more like an illegal kidnapping than a lawful deportation.
Lawyers for the 2-year-old’s father filed an emergency petition seeking her release on May 24, but she was put on a plane to Honduras before court opened the next morning. District Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee, stressed that it’s “illegal and unconstitutional” to deport U.S. citizens, and wrote that it appeared the Trump administration had “just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
But if helpless, sick little children are the most innocent, vulnerable victims of Trump’s immigration lawlessness, judges who would protect them — and the rule of law — represent the opposite poll: people with the power to curb his lawlessness. And they’ve become victims, too.
Executive Attack on the Judiciary
Trump has long attacked judges ruling against him, but recently, he’s been joined by GOP congress members calling for their impeachment. This led Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare push-back in mid-March. “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said. “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
But the next week GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson escalated the attacks. “We can eliminate an entire district court,” he told reporters. “We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things,” he said. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”
Then, on April 25, the administration arrested Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan and accused her of helping a Mexican immigrant evade arrest by federal agents. They handcuffed her in public — unprecedented treatment for a judge, clearly playing to Trump’s base, as FBI Director Kash Patel quickly publicized it on social media. But the criminal complaint against her was noticeably lacking, legal blogger Marcy Wheeler noted.
“DOJ didn’t even bother convening a grand jury to find out whether there’s any evidence that Judge Dugan had corrupt intent before arresting her at the courthouse and ginning up an even bigger media storm about it,” she wrote.
“Until they actually look for evidence of corrupt intent, this is a media campaign against the judiciary, not a criminal prosecution.”
Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin was even more blunt.
“By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this president is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line,” she said.
Even conservative jurists were outraged. “The obvious purpose of the arrest of Judge Dugan on criminal charges is to intimidate and threaten all judges, state and local, across the country,” J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge, told the Washington Post.
The general public broadly agrees. “More than 6 in 10 say they think federal judges are trying to enforce existing limits on Trump’s authority,” the Post reported, “compared with slightly more than 1 in 3 who say these judges are trying to interfere with the president’s authority.” More damningly, “About two-thirds say they think the administration is trying to avoid complying with court orders.”
A Range of Other Targets
Other cases showing different facets of Trump’s cruelty, lawlessness or folly — and the range of people targetted — include the following:
Rümeysa Öztürk is a Turkish national Ph.D. student at Tufts University who was abducted off the streets by plainclothes agents in what looked like a kidnapping. Her student visa had been secretly revoked four days earlier, thereby making her presence in the U.S. illegal, without any legal process.
She was targeted for a student newspaper op-ed last year that was critical of the school’s response to Gaza protests, calling for them to act in accord with a vote by the student senate — hardly a radical idea. In fact, Tufts University Democrats and Republicans have released a joint statement supporting her.
She’s being held in a Louisian detention center, where she was visited by Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and representatives Jim McGovern and Ayanna Pressley. Afterward, they wrote in the New York Times, “This is not immigration enforcement. This is repression. This is authoritarianism. The Trump administration is working overtime to silence dissent and terrorize immigrant communities.”
Kseniia Petrova is a Harvard Medical School research scientist working on cancer and life extension, who fled Russia for fear of prosecution for her political beliefs. She had her visa canceled and was arrested at Logan airport in Boston for the “crime” of not declaring some frog-embryo samples for research, which her superiors had asked her to bring back from Europe with her, as previous attempts to ship via air freight hadn’t been successful. The first customs officer who spoke with her cleared her to leave, but a second one arrested her. She’s now also in a Louisiana ICE facility.
Mahmoud Khalil is a legal permanent U.S. resident, married to an American citizen who gave birth to their first child while he was in custody in Louisiana. He was arrested under false pretenses without a warrant, and faces deportation based on the groundless claim that his presence in America posed, “potentially serious foreign policy consequences.”
Khalil served as spokesperson and negotiator for campus activists at Columbia last year during large demonstrations against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the war in Gaza. Contrary to Zionist propaganda equating pro-Palestinian views with antisemitism, he has strong support from Jewish students who chained themselves to Columbia gates in protest of his arrest. “I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand by hand, and you cannot achieve one without the other,” he said in a 2024 interview.
Andry Hernandez Romero is a gay makeup artist who sought asylum in the U.S. last year, and the government had found that threats against him were credible, giving him a good chance of gaining asylum. But then, he “just disappeared,” his lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski told 60 Minutes.
He was one of 238 Venezuelan migrants who were flown to El Salvador in mid-March, and there’s been no trace of him since. He was taken under the triple pretense that he was a member of Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, that that gang acts as an agent of the Venezuelan government, and that doing so allows Trump to deport gang members under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which has only been used before in times of war — most recently for the infamous mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.
But he’s not a gang member. Like many others, he was falsely identified as such because of tattoos, which Tren de Aragua does not use to identify membership. What’s more, the tattoos cited in his case were crowns on top of the names of his parents.
“The most plausible explanation for that is that his mom and dad are his king and queen,” Toczylowski said.
Nor is the gang an agent of the Venezuelan government, according to a mid-April U.S. intelligence assessment drawing from 18 agencies. Finally, the peacetime use of the Alien Enemies Act is legally, if not constitutionally questionable, and is being challenged in court.
What all these cases show — and there are many more similar to them — is that one big lie can serve as an umbrella for countless others. Indeed, it has to. Because it is a lie so sweeping that it encompasses so much, it inevitably conflicts with the truth over and over again. And so it must generate a seemingly endless stream of lies.