A Bargain in the Dark: On Abrego García, Bukele, and the President’s Disdain for Law
Democracy Doesn’t Die in Secret. It Dies in the Room Where It Happens
By Dino Alonso
Let us not waste breath on decorum. Something unholy happened in that room.
The President of the United States, who has made it his life’s work to shatter the very idea of justice, stood beside a foreign strongman and found—in him—not opposition, not discomfort, but agreement. An understanding. A gentleman’s deal dressed up in diplomatic varnish.
They would have you believe it was nothing.
They would have you believe that President Bukele’s refusal to return Kilmar Abrego García, a man this government unlawfully deported despite a Supreme Court order, is a sovereign decision.
They would have you believe the President’s hands are tied.
But I do not believe in coincidences that smell of smoke and taste of power.
I believe in patterns.
And this one is plain: the President did not want to obey the highest court in the land. So fate delivered him an escape hatch—carried in the smile of a man who runs mega-prisons and boasts of discipline. Bukele declared the idea of returning García “preposterous. " Just like that, the President’s defiance was no longer a scandal—it was someone else’s problem.
How convenient.
How miraculous.
How useful for a man who refuses to kneel before anything but his image.
And I must ask: what was offered in return?
Because this administration plays no games without chips on the table, they deal in currency, real and symbolic. The U.S. had slapped a 10% tariff on El Salvador weeks before. Suddenly, the White House is transferring millions of dollars to Bukele’s prison system to “house deportees.” Suddenly, El Salvador becomes the vault that holds the body of a man our courts have ruled must be returned.
Now, the President turns to us with a shrug, palms up. “What can I do?” he says. “They won’t give him back.”
That is not diplomacy. That is theater soaked in cruelty.
The President knows full well that foreign leaders do not obstruct without signals. This is not the noise of disagreement but the music of complicity. A show staged for plausible deniability.
And if the cost of the performance is one man—Abrego García, imprisoned abroad, exiled from due process—then so be it. This administration has shown again and again that individual suffering is not a deterrent but a currency—something to be traded, something to be ignored.
But this is not just about one man.
This is about a president who cannot stand to be told “no.”
This is about a government that sees the Constitution as a suggestion, the Court as an inconvenience, and international collaboration as a loophole large enough to crawl through.
This is about a people—us—who are being trained, slowly and ruthlessly, to expect less of our democracy.
We are being taught that when the law says “go,” and the President says “stay,” the law will sit down and wait. If another flag blocks the path, he will use it as a curtain.
And behind that curtain, deals are made. Silence is sold. Tariffs disappear.
And a man rots in a foreign cell.
Do not tell me this is politics. This is subversion dressed as circumstance. This is how law dies—not with a gunshot, but with a handshake in a hallway and a memo that no one signs.
Hannah Arendt warned us: totalitarianism begins when legality is preserved in form but hollowed in substance. When the forms of democracy remain—courts, orders, rules—but the spirit of obedience to law, the principle of constraint on the executive, disappears.
And so we arrive at this moment: a President who does not need to break the law if someone else will do it for him.
And if El Salvador won’t return García?
That is the plan.
That is the brilliance.
That is the betrayal.
And it is being carried out in our name.
“The greatest danger to liberty lurks in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
— Justice Louis Brandeis