Will Leitch, writing on his Medium account, outlines what he feels is the red line moment in this current administration.

There are certain red line moments, however, in which something happens that’s so ghastly, so monstrous, so (the word has to be used) evil, that if we cross that rubicon, if we step across that red line, there is no returning. There are times when you have talk about it, and do something about it, because if you don’t, it will be too late. I have a book to promote. I have a family to spend time with. I have work to do. I have baseball games and movies to watch. I have so much of the world I want to take in, and write about, and absorb. We all do.

But we have to talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and what has happened to him and, many, many people like him. Because if we do not rise up about this — this, specifically — I am not sure we can come back.

He is a sheet metal worker in Maryland, a union member, a part-time student at the University of Maryland, where he is working toward a vocational license. He is married, with a five-year-old autistic child who is also deaf; he is the stepfather to two other children, one autistic, one who has epilepsy. He is from El Salvador and emigrated to the United States in 2011, when he was 16, because his parents, being extorted by a local gang, feared he would be murdered by them. He is not a United States citizen, but he is married to one and the parent to three, and he has regularly checked in with immigration authorities every year since he arrived, who have consistently affirmed his right to be here. (Including a ruling by a federal judge in 2019 that he belonged in the United States.) He works, he pays taxes, he raises a family. He has no criminal record, and no connections to anyone who does, despite desperate, pathetic attempts to pretend that he does. He is just a regular person, like you, like me, like just about everyone you know.

On March 15, he was taken by this adminstration to a gulag in El Salvador, the CECOT, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo for no reason. He was in the United States legally. He is not a member of the MS-13 gang contrary to what others in the administration continue to lie about. The Trump administration has already said his literal abduction was an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court ruled that he must be returned. Trump illegally sent a man to a notorious prison without due process and is now defying a Supreme Court ruling by not finding a way to bring him home.

This is the red line.

So who’s next? It could be someone very close to you. It could be you. It could be anyone. I have spent years and years writing about my fear about this time, the struggles of raising kids during this time, of wondering what there will be left for them to inherit, of trying to grasp how much they will have to fix.

But this world — a world that is being explicitly telegraphed, that may be leading to a battle with the Supreme Court that could cement it — is a world that there is no coming back from. This isn’t about politics. We’re not talking about tax policy, or regulation, or balancing the budget. We’re talking about fundamental human decency vs. evil here. I know people who voted for Trump. I care about people who voted for Trump. But if you really look at this, with eyes even slightly open, there is nothing any American, or human, can defend here.

There is so much going on. There is so much to take in. But Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a bright red line, because if we do not stop this from happening to him — if we do not get him home, if we do not stop this, instantly — we will not be able to stop it from happening to anyone. It is difficult to figure out what fights are worth going to the mat for, amidst all the chaos. It can be overwhelming. It is overwhelming.

But I cannot think of a fight more important than this one.

I am already so very tired of all of this.