Get Off The State’s Roller Coaster

In March 2025, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was detained by ICE while driving his five-year-old son home in Baltimore. Three days later, in violation of a 2019 immigration court order explicitly protecting him from removal to El Salvador, he was deported to CECOT, a maximum-security prison the Salvadoran government built to hold gang members and that human rights organisations have documented as a site of serious abuse.

He had not been charged with anything. He had a valid work permit, was under federal supervision, and had a standing legal order shielding him from exactly what happened to him. The administration called it an administrative error.

The Supreme Court ordered the government to facilitate his return. After months of resistance and the threat of contempt proceedings, the administration complied. Abrego Garcia was brought back to the United States in June 2025. Within days of his return, he was charged with human smuggling based on a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in which he had been pulled over for speeding, allowed to continue driving with a warning, and released without charges. Homeland Security had been aware of that traffic stop for three years and had closed the file on it before deporting him.

On 22 May 2026, US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed the indictment. His ruling was unambiguous: “The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” The charges, in the judge’s finding, were vindictive. The administration had charged a man with a crime because he won in court.

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi had announced those same charges at a press conference. “This,” she declared, “is what American justice looks like.”

Two weeks ago, this publication ran a piece on the defeat of Thomas Massie in the Kentucky 4th Congressional District primary. The argument was that the result, though uncomfortable for many in principled political circles, was the outcome most compatible with clear thinking about how the system actually functions. A legislature structured around party-line incentives will, given sufficient motive and means, remove members who do not serve those incentives. Massie was not a durable feature of the Republican Party. He was a correctable anomaly. The correction confirmed the structural diagnosis.

Massie’s loss was a negative data point. Abrego Garcia’s vindication looks like a positive one. The same framework reads both.

The temptation, when a judge dismisses a vindictive prosecution, is to read it as evidence that accountability functions. That the system has self-correcting mechanisms. That truth, pursued through the proper channels with sufficient patience, eventually produces just outcomes. Remain engaged. Trust the process. The institutions held.

That is not what happened in Nashville on 22 May.

What happened is that the system’s retaliatory response became too visible to survive in open court. The judge did not vindicate Abrego Garcia because the system corrected itself. He vindicated him because the government’s own timeline made the vindictiveness impossible to deny. A traffic stop that had been closed for three years was reopened the moment a Supreme Court order made continued persecution through immigration channels unavailable. The charging decision left a paper trail that documented its own purpose.

The administration did not retreat because it acknowledged wrongdoing. It lost in court because it overreached far enough that even a federal judge could not let the prosecution stand. These are different things.

The officials who authorised the original deportation in violation of a court order retained their positions. The officials who coordinated the reopening of a closed investigation to produce criminal charges against a man who had embarrassed them retained their positions. Bondi’s press conference, in which she held up a retaliatory indictment as a demonstration of American justice, has not been formally corrected or walked back.

The system lost a case. The system continued.

The Abrego Garcia sequence shows the full pattern with unusual clarity. First came the original violation: deportation to a brutalisation facility in defiance of a court order, with the administration characterising it as an error. Then, when courts ordered return and the immigration enforcement route was blocked, came the retaliatory prosecution: charges filed against a man for a three-year-old incident that had already been closed, timed precisely to his return under court order.

That sequence is not complicated. A boundary was set through litigation. The system lost. It then deployed a different instrument to punish the person who had set the boundary. The judge’s own words in the dismissal order named it: the prosecution existed because the lawsuit succeeded.

This is narcissistic rage pattern. The response was not proportional to an alleged crime. It was proportional to the identity threat posed by someone successfully challenging the system’s claimed authority. The charges were the instrument of punishment. The press conference was the public performance of dominance reasserted.

What the judge’s ruling did was make the sequence explicit in a court record. It did not change what the administration did. It documented it.

When a federal judge dismisses charges as vindictive, there is a reading available that is seductive and wrong: the system worked. A man was wronged. He fought back through legal channels. A court recognised the retaliation. Justice was done.

That reading treats a specific judicial outcome as a statement about the system’s general character rather than a statement about one judge’s assessment of one government’s paper trail in one case.

The Massie result told a story about which independent actors the contemporary Republican Party structure will not tolerate once the cost of removal becomes manageable. The Abrego Garcia result tells a story about what happens when the state’s retaliatory mechanism is deployed so transparently that its own documentation defeats it. Both stories are diagnostic. Neither is a prescription.

The white pill is not that the state sometimes loses cases. It is that the state’s behavior, when read clearly rather than hopefully, is consistently legible. An administration that files criminal charges against a man because he won in court is an administration operating exactly as the framework predicts. The judge’s ruling confirms the diagnosis as firmly as the deportation did.

Abrego Garcia won in Tennessee. He remains under ICE supervision. The DOJ has announced it will appeal. The system that produced his original deportation, his brutalisation, his retaliatory prosecution, and his vindication is the same system this morning as it was before the ruling.

Abrego Garcia’s family’s persistence through fourteen months of this deserves nothing but respect. They had to navigate an immigration system, a criminal prosecution, ICE detention, and a series of attempts to deport him to multiple African countries, simultaneously, for over a year. The vindication in Nashville is real. It matters to them.

Respecting that outcome is not the same as concluding that the system demonstrated its correctable nature. Both can be true: the ruling was right, and the system that required the ruling behaved throughout in ways entirely consistent with a structure that does not acknowledge wrongdoing, retaliates against those who challenge it, and retreats only when exposure makes continuation more costly than withdrawal.

The framework does not produce despair. It produces calibrated expectation. Despair says nothing matters. Calibrated expectation says: this system, whether it is removing a congressman who refuses party-line discipline or filing retaliatory charges against a man who embarrassed it, follows a predictable logic. Stable expectations about that logic are more useful than either hope or grief.

Massie’s removal was predictable. Abrego Garcia’s retaliatory prosecution was predictable. The dismissal of that prosecution, when the government’s own timeline made vindictiveness legally indefensible, was predictable.

None of these outcomes should update the structural diagnosis. All of them confirm it.

The roller coaster has a loop where the hero wins and a loop where the hero loses. The point is not which loop you are currently on, but rather why are you paying to ride this roller coaster at all.

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Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s dismissal order in United States v. Abrego Garcia was issued 22 May 2026 in the Middle District of Tennessee. The DOJ announced the same day it would appeal. The Thomas Massie primary piece, referenced above, ran in this publication on 21 May 2026.

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