An Administrative Error

New Orleans, LA, USA - March 4, 2025: Side view of Homeland Security Special Response Team armored vehicle with Immigration Custom Enforcement police on the vehicle at the Rex Parade on Mardi Gras day / Shutterstock.com

A man is in a Salvadoran prison right now because of an “administrative error.”

His name is Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He was in the United States legally, with protected status granted by an immigration judge. He has a wife and a five-year-old child who are American citizens. And now he sits in El Salvador's “Terrorism Confinement Center” because someone at ICE made a mistake.

The response from our government? A shrug. A filing that says American courts lack jurisdiction to fix this catastrophic “error.” A vice president who falsely claims on social media that Mr. Abrego Garcia was "a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here."

This is not governance. This is performance.

Not performance in the noble sense—the acrobat who trains for years to achieve precision, the musician whose disciplined practice culminates in transcendent art. No, this is performance as concealment. As distraction. As the magician's flourish that draws your eye away from the mechanics of the trick.

When an American resident with legal status is wrongfully deported and imprisoned in a foreign country, that is not an “administrative error.” That language—bloodless, bureaucratic, passive—is itself a performance designed to obscure the moral horror of what has occurred.

When officials claim they cannot correct this “error” because it would interfere with “a unified course of conduct for the United States' foreign affairs,” that is not statecraft. It is stagecraft—the elevation of abstract policy aesthetics over concrete human consequences.

When our vice president broadcasts demonstrable falsehoods about a man's criminal history and legal status, that is not communication. It is performance—playing to an audience that values theatrical cruelty over factual accuracy.

Hannah Arendt, reflecting on the bureaucratization of evil, observed: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” The administrative error. The jurisdictional technicality. The procedural impossibility. These are the costumes that moral abdication wears to make itself presentable.

The performative nature of this politics reveals itself most clearly in its inconsistencies. The same administration that claims helplessness before jurisdictional limitations simultaneously asserts vast executive authority in other domains. The same officials who plead procedural constraints when asked to rescue an innocent man boast about their decisive action when addressing their base. The performance changes depending on the audience, while the underlying moral vacancy remains constant.

But here is what the performers forget: A man sits in a cell. A child misses their father. A wife fights for her husband's return. These are not abstractions or staging elements. They are the reality that all this performance is designed to conceal.

As the philosopher Albert Camus wrote: “The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience.” Today's “administrative errors” and their bureaucratic justifications serve the same function—allowing functionaries to participate in cruelty while maintaining their self-image as merely doing their jobs.

The danger lies not just in the specific injustice inflicted upon Mr. Abrego Garcia and his family. It lies in our collective habituation to this mode of governance-as-performance, where words no longer connect to meaning, where accountability disappears into jurisdictional crevices, where human suffering becomes an acceptable cost of maintaining the spectacle.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is in prison because our government put him there, knowingly violating his legal rights, and now refuses to correct its “error.”

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold.