As we come under threat, it is vital that we do not only look inwards and ask how we can be more secure, but also look outwards and ask how we can help. 

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is currently trapped in El Salvador's prison system, having first been sent to CECOT, a modern concentration camp ruled by a petty client dictator to Donald Trump, before being moved to another one of that tyrant's lawless hellholes. He has been charged with no crime, and in fact the US Government has admitted that he was deported in error, yet both the US and El Salvador maintain that returning him is impossible. El Salvador maintains, ridiculously, that it is powerless to send a so-called terrorist back the US, and the US maintains that they have no obligation to affect his return. 

Canada has a rare opportunity to cut the Gordian knot here by unilaterally offering Mr. Abrego Garcia asylum in Canada and offering to take the man, who El Salvador calls a terrorist, off their hands. Canada can effectively call the bluff here, and say "sure we'll take responsibility for the terrorist, free of charge. The plane is already waiting in the airport." 

In terms of how this would mechanically work: Canada has an embassy in San Salvador, El Salvador's capital. We could communicate our intention to accept him and request and/or pressure El Salvador to deliver him to the embassy's door. He is then escorted to an airport and put on a plane. Upon landing on Canadian soil, he requests asylum officially. What is needed for this plan to work is a lack of interference: he needs to leave the prison walls and be allowed to get on an airplane, whether alone or with an escort; the US government would need to "facilitate" this release by refraining from getting in the way, likely under public and legal pressure; the Canadian government needs to understand the goal and agree to take initiative. This petition primarily addresses that third point. 

If this plan works, it would mean that Mr. Abrego Garcia can continue to legally challenge his deportation while living as a free man, that his family would be able to see him again, that his lawyers would have easy access to him, and that he would be able to tell the world about the horrors of CECOT and the other prisons he has been sent to. If it does not work, then the attempt would at least pull the rug out from under the Trump administration's current playbook and disrupt their plans.

The point here is, even just offering asylum, by itself, undermines the administration's propaganda strategy and creates tangible evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia is not dangerous. After all, if he was, why would Canada have done this? This is a way to not only say that we support the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty, but to make it clear to outside observers that we really mean it. 

Kilmar Abrego Garcia has, in effect, been rendered stateless: he has been deprived not only of his rights but of what Hannah Arendt called the right to have rights. Not protected in America and deprived of due process in El Salvador, without a government to stand up for him he has no recourse against this mistreatment. Canada, as a sovereign state, has the power to intervene. Indeed, it must.