Finally obeying the Supreme Court’s ruling 9-0 to return to the U.S. Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man with legal protections who was illegally sent to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration has followed the law and brought him back. That is good.

But this being the Trump administration, Abrego García is now suddenly facing multiple federal criminal charges surrounding the allegation that he once ferried people in the country illegally to different states.

Whether the indictment is solid or not, Abrego García will now have competent legal defense and will be before independent judges. He is entitled to all protections that are due under the Constitution, which the disappearance of him to El Salvador abrogated.

There are no new facts in this case, only what was substantially already known to investigators and prosecutors. There could be myriad reasons why federal law enforcement did not take any action beforehand, ranging from lack of evidence to simple resource allocation.

But what is certain is that only reason why they’re pursuing it now: to send the signal that the Trump government won’t tolerate questioning its enforcement efforts, and that if you become enough of a public thorn in their side — even if it is the result of popular outrage you don’t have any hand in — they’ll go after you.

As predictable as a ploy, as this is, it’s at least a good thing that he will not remain in the Salvadoran prison system; at this point, he’s the only publicly-known person to ever leave CECOT alive. In the United States, he’ll have access to the still-active protections of our legal system and can actually fight acknowledged charges with his attorneys.

To state the obvious, this is a pretty clear indication that the administration always could get the Salvadorans to return custody. The insistence of Attorney General Pam Bondi and others that they had no ability to correct their acknowledged error was always a lie, and there should be consequences for that lie. Maryland Federal Judge Paula Xinis, who issued the original order for his return, has already set the groundwork to hold federal officials in contempt, and she should continue to explore that avenue even though he’s now been brought back.

The fact of Abrego Garcia‘s return does not mean that everything is above board with regards to the administration’s use of CECOT or Trump‘s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, under which most of the other detainees were sent. This was merely the case where the administration had most individually and egregiously violated the law, but, as D.C. Federal Judge James Boasberg recently ruled, every single removal under that policy — which to remind readers is based on the absurd conceit that the United States is in something akin to war against Venezuela — was unlawful.

This isn’t over until the government returns every person removed under the AEA and stops contracting with a foreign government to indefinitely imprison people on no charge, a policy for which it has never laid out any legal basis. The public outrage that was struck by Abrego Garcia‘s detention and removal should extend to all others who remain held there without charge, and to all of the people the administration continues to detain every day just for trying to follow the law.

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