Rachel Maddow didn’t just frame Kilmar Abrego-García as a victim herself — she handed the microphone to his defense attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a longtime immigration advocate. By bringing on Abrego-García’s defense lawyer, Maddow guaranteed viewers would hear a one-sided account — one that ignores the most damaging facts and recasts the story to make Abrego-García look like the victim. That’s what defense attorneys are trained to do. Moshenberg has gone beyond courtroom filings, blasting ICE in the press, organizing rallies, and framing every enforcement move as punitive. Maddow teed him up with sympathy, and he painted Abrego-García as someone who had done nothing to bring trouble on himself and was suddenly blindsided by ICE:
“Yeah, he’s certainly not someone who brought this upon himself or asked for this in any way. He was not an activist or anything like that, right? To the contrary, he’s someone who understood that his immigration problems were over. And in the past, he won his case in 2019, you know, he won his deportation case. He won an order from a judge. He was here, he had a work permit for over half a decade. It was renewed under the first Trump administration twice. So he had no reason to believe that he was in any type of immigration problem whatsoever. And then from one day to the next, he’s, you know, driving legally with his driver’s license in Maryland. And then three days later he’s in the middle of CECOT and has no idea if anyone even knows where he is, much less that the whole country was struggling for him and marching and rooting for him to be brought back to the United States.”
But here’s the truth Maddow and Moshenberg skipped: of course Abrego-García brought this on himself — because he came to the United States illegally. That’s why he was placed under a removal order in the first place. The 2019 judge’s ruling didn’t erase that; it only gave him temporary withholding from deportation to El Salvador. He remained in the country unlawfully, under ICE supervision, and removable to a third country at any time. His immigration “problems” were never over — because they began with his own illegal entry.
And about those work permits: Maddow and Moshenberg made it sound like Trump’s administration renewed them as an act of approval. That’s false. The permits flowed automatically from the 2019 judge’s order, which Trump’s DHS actually appealed and fought. Trump’s administration never signed off on letting him stay — they opposed his case from the beginning and pursued his removal. The work permits weren’t gifts from Trump; they were a temporary legal byproduct of a court order that his administration was actively trying to overturn.
What Maddow didn’t tell her audience is just as important as what she let her guest say unchecked. Court records show Abrego-Garcia’s wife filed two protective orders accusing him of physical abuse, allegations judges described as “serious and concerning.” A 2018 custody motion accused her of “dating a gang member.” Federal prosecutors later alleged that his smuggling operation transported MS-13 associates and even hid children on floorboards to cram more migrants into vehicles. In 2025, the Department of Justice indicted him for running a multi-year human smuggling ring.
Yet none of that made it into Maddow’s segment. Instead, she presented a sympathetic portrait of a man supposedly blindsided by Trump’s cruelty, when in reality his record is filled with red flags.
The facts are clear: Trump’s DHS never supported Abrego-García’s stay. They fought his case in 2019, appealed the judge’s ruling, and later executed his deportation once courts stripped away his temporary protection. Maddow’s narrative may make for compelling TV for Democrats, but it erased every inconvenient fact to turn an indicted smuggler and illegal alien into a political victim.