Much is disturbing about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. For starters, he was deported to an El Salvador prison due to what one Republican US Senator recently called “a screw-up” by the Trump administration and what the federal government confessed in a March 31 court filing was “an administrative error.”
More troubling, of course, is the battle over his return to the United States that has put the executive and judicial branches on a constitutional collision course, with the Trump administration failing to swiftly return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who Ronald Reagan appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel last week that:
The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
The Trump administration, however, attempts to focus public attention not on constitutional issues of due process but on Abrego Garcia himself, painting him as evil incarnate. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has variously called him a gang member, an “apparent woman beater,” and a “foreign terrorist” who has “engaged in human trafficking.” In short, the White House seeks to shift the storyline away from constitutional concerns to one that plays well with President Trump’s still faithful MAGA base.
Sadly, perhaps the only unsurprising thing here is that when the broadcast news media don’t embrace hook, line, and sinker the White House’s frame that Abrego Garcia deserves what he gets, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr engages in saber-rattling towards an owner of some news outlets, claiming their coverage may violate the FCC’s news distortion rule and statutory obligation to serve the public interest. Carr’s words were directed at Comcast, the parent company of NBC and MSNBC, and they came just one day after Trump, who elevated Carr to chairman, lashed out at Comcast and its chairman and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, on social media.
Carr wrote on X on April 16 that:
Comcast outlets spent days misleading the American public—implying that Abrego Garcia was merely a law abiding U.S. citizen, just a regular “Maryland man.” When the truth comes out, they ignore it. Comcast knows that federal law requires its licensed operations to serve the public interest. News distortion doesn’t cut it.
Jon Brodkin explained in Ars Technica that “Carr’s use of the phrase ‘news distortion’ is significant because he has been invoking the FCC’s rarely enforced news distortion policy to pressure licensed broadcasters that he perceives as being biased against President Trump.” Brodkin adds that the FCC has historically “enforced the [news distortion] policy in only the most extreme cases where there is evidence of misconduct, such as a bribe, or instructions from management to distort the news.”
More broadly, Ted Johnson of Deadline observes that “Carr’s comments are the latest example of the Trump administration threatening, implicitly or explicitly, a news outlet over its editorial decisions.” For example, and as I addressed last week and in February, the Associated Press’s First Amendment-protected editorial decision to use “Gulf of Mexico” to identify a body of water that Trump renamed the “Gulf of America” cost the venerable wire service its longstanding White House press-pool access.
Carr’s thinly veiled threat to deploy the news distortion rule against Comcast-owned stations for airing news coverage Trump doesn’t like is all too predictable. As I’ve described before, the FCC is now investigating whether CBS violated the news distortion rule when it edited Bill Whitaker’s 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. Trump has filed a lawsuit against Paramount Global (owner of CBS) over the matter, seeking $20 billion.
The Trump-Carr alliance is part of a larger, more dangerous effort by the president to quash dissent and control the press. I recently wrote that:
Trump’s war against the press ultimately is one against a system of democratic self-governance that features multiple checks and balances on individuals and entities wielding government power. Trump seeks to eliminate, through the time, expense, and chilling power of lawsuits, plus via access restrictions, journalists who play watchdog roles on government abuses. Trump wants a lapdog press that parrots and promotes his views.
Carr would do well to remember that when Trump exits the Oval Office and a Democrat eventually becomes president, Carr will have given a Democratic majority on the FCC the green light to use the news distortion rule to punish conservative-tilting news organizations. Even if Carr doesn’t mind, most Republicans should.