Is the government keeping Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s pupusa recipe secret?

by philg

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the noblest, most valuable, and most important resident of Maryland, made a pupusa-based asylum claim in 2019 (AP):

Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or pork.

The entire family, including his two sisters and brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was buying ingredients and making deliveries with his older brother, Cesar.

“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.

A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.

The vast U.S. immigration bureaucracy found the pupusa story credible. The home-based business made such great pupusas that it was ripe for extortion by a powerful gang. Presumably, no judge would have made this finding without having seen the recipe for the Abrego Garcia pupusas. Yet, as with the JFK assassination investigation files, there has been a massive coverup and the pupusa recipe hasn’t been released. Why not a Freedom of Information Act request to ICE to get the recipe so that every American who is passionate about due process can make pupusas every night until Mr. Abrego Garcia is free.

Here’s a Maryland Senator, Mr. Abrego Garcia, an interpreter, I think (why bother to learn English if you’re in the U.S. for only 15 years?), and margaritas (from X):

In the meantime, we have ChatGPT:

Here’s a basic pupusa recipe — traditional Salvadoran stuffed corn cakes — with just a few ingredients:

Ingredients:

For the dough:

  • 2 cups masa harina (corn flour, such as Maseca)
  • 1½ to 2 cups warm water
  • ½ tsp salt

Common fillings:

  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella (or Salvadoran quesillo if available)
  • Optional: refried beans, cooked pork (chicharrón), or loroco (a Central American edible flower)

Instructions:

  1. Make the dough:
    • In a large bowl, mix masa harina with salt.
    • Slowly add warm water and knead until you get a soft, pliable dough that doesn’t crack or stick to your hands. Let it rest for 10 minutes.
  2. Prepare fillings:
    • Mix cheese with beans or pork if using.
    • Divide the filling into about 6–8 portions.
  3. Form the pupusas:
    • Wet your hands and divide the dough into 6–8 equal balls.
    • Flatten a ball into a 4-inch disc, place a spoonful of filling in the center, then pinch the dough closed around it.
    • Flatten it gently into a thick disc, about 4–5 inches wide.
  4. Cook:
    • Heat a lightly oiled skillet or griddle over medium heat.
    • Cook each pupusa for about 2–3 minutes per side, until golden and slightly blistered.
  5. Serve:
    • Serve hot with curtido (a lightly fermented cabbage slaw) and tomato salsa.

12 thoughts on “Is the government keeping Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s pupusa recipe secret?”

  1. The extortion story is 100% credible, that is how protection rackets work in places where police is feckless, or run the official (high cost) protection racket. And a lot of protection rackets are run by imbeciles who will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs by making excessive demands, because they are the kind of imbeciles with frontal lobes damage caused by diesel contaminate cocaine, or simply poor genetics, who do that kind of stuff.

    Whether the US should save people in those circumstance is a different discussion, but the claim is credible.

    • Turns out that all citizens of Colombia, Venezuela, favela-adjacent parts of Brazil and Mexico have “a credible claim” to move to US.

    • Federico, seems that this argument was designed specifically for first world feel-good judge who also has a political agenda to uphold. By making businesses be home – run it gives argument impossibility to verify or repudiate. Pupusa seems to be a simple enough dish to make. By analogy from other second and third world countries, pretty much everyone cooks traditional food at home. But in America and Europe it makes a good story – people cook only on occasions and preffer to taste fake traditional dishes, with high fructose corn syrup in case of USA, at ethnic – sounding restaurants. It makes the story easy to sell. There is whole industry of immigration lawyers and organizations in America who coach their clients how to sell/explain to judges and immigration services. Basically, most likely that some lawyers or organizations took a story that is currently accepted by bureaucracy and law and tell their clients to go with it. The story could have real life origins for someone but after coaching it just becomes a virtual story where reality is not important.

    • Gino: I think that you’re correct. If Federico is the immigration judge anyone from anywhere in the world can become a U.S. citizen by saying “I had $1 in total assets and a gang was extorting me for $1, threatening to kill me if I didn’t hand over the dollar.”

    • Phil, I do not think I claimed that being victim of a protection racket should automatically grant asylum in the US. I also took in good faith the story of a family business being extorted, if any you wants to address the veracity of the claim, once more, it is a different discussion.

      If any of you gentlemen has experience of running a business in a crime rich environment without ever having to deal with capricious and unreasonable demands made by imbeciles who will actually kill you if you do not comply, please let us know your strategies to make yourselves crime proof!

    • Federico, do not want to sound as samone against Sourh American immigration, I am not, but pupusa small business account sounds incredible, based on my prior experiences with businesses in high crime places. One of my old friends who got into personal business was kidnapped, another one murdered on a business trip. Many were extorted and all had to plan for securities measures. There were huge number of new food businesses but none of them were selling traditional food from their home kitchen. And somehow none of my business friends qualified for US asylum without investing clean $millions in the US. If pupusa business stopped working because of some home brewed extortion which is apparently was easily overcome with one election, wait till they meet FDA or NYC auditors. The hole story is fantastic, for lame judges whose task is accept as many as possible for whatever reason.

    • Federico: you say “I also took in good faith the story of a family business being extorted”. Your combined lack of faith in human nature (gangs are everywhere that low-margin 25 cent items are sold) and faith in human nature (someone who crossed the border illegally would never lie) is interesting. But I do think that if you accept this story “in good faith” then 100% of migrants to the U.S. would find it easy to spin a tale that you’d also accept “in good faith”.

    • @Federico,

      >If any of you gentlemen has experience of running a business in a crime rich environment without ever having to deal with capricious and unreasonable demands made by imbeciles who will actually kill you if you do not comply, please let us know your strategies to make yourselves crime proof!

      Wait, what? So any person, in any country, whose government fails to protect their citizens is now automatically entitled asylum and protection here in U.S by the U.S. government?

    • George A: I think Federico is correct in practice. Maybe in theory U.S. law limits asylum to targeted ethnic groups, e.g., the noble 4+ million Afghans who are currently being expelled by Pakistan (see https://www.dw.com/en/why-is-pakistan-expelling-afghan-refugees/a-71732536 ) or the 25 percent of progressive poster child Bhutan’s population that was expelled (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_in_Bhutan ). But during the Biden administration a claim of domestic violence (“our golden retriever bit me”) was sufficient and claiming to be a target of a gang in nearly any country should work. Even Switzerland has gangs according to https://ocindex.net/country/switzerland (“Additionally, foreign criminal groups, such as Balkan mafias, dominate the Swiss criminal markets for drugs, human trafficking, human smuggling and arms smuggling. West African gangs, particularly Nigerian criminal associations, also have established networks in neighbouring France and Italy, with increasing influence in recent decades. With few domestic criminal networks, the Swiss criminal market is largely controlled by foreign actors.”). So anyone from Switzerland could go in front of Judge Federico and say “I bought wholesale chocolate bars and then sold them out of my house for 3 CHF each. I was being extorted by a local West African gang so I fled here” and Federico would then say that he/she/ze/they could stay in the U.S. and collect welfare for four generations.

    • My biggest revelation in all of this is that “immigration judges” are Administrative Law Judges (ALJ) within the Executive Branch and NOT Article III judges. Therefore, they all report to POTUS, and POTUS can overrule any of them at any time.

      We probably are headed for some kind of constitutional crisis given the unprecedented number of injunctions against the current and previous Trump administration (issued by ~92% Democrat-appointed judges), but POTUS overriding an “immigration judge” is completely within bounds.

    • I’ve got a blog post scheduled on this topic for April 24, but I think that the honest way to change U.S. immigration policy would be Congress repealing the Refugee Act of 1980, which is supposedly what kicked off the system that enables anyone who with an IQ above room temperature to obtain asylum by telling an appropriate tale that will have to be accepted “in good faith” since there won’t be any witnesses from the other side. In the case of person who ran a home-based pupusa business, for example, the asylum-seeker will testify before Judge Federico, but nobody else who was in that El Salvador neighborhood circa 2010 will testify. So a judge who has “good faith” will have to accept the one story that he/she/ze/they hears. Even a 20-year-old sexual assault tale by a lithe young fit actress who says that she wasn’t able to outrun the elderly obese Harvey Weinstein has more chance of being resolved factually since Fat Harvey is still alive (sort of) and can try to dig up a hazy memory of what happened with a role-hungry actress two decades ago.

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