In "Abrego Garcia is a fake gangster. Trump and Bukele are not" (Public Notice, 2 July 2025), Liz Dye addresses Kilmer Abrego Garcia's "dystopian journey through several prisons and at least two countries": "To call it Kafkaesque is to reduce it to a tale of bureaucratic absurdity, rather than a maelstrom of lies concocted to cover up a terrible policy." While Dye's overall point is correct, she herself "reduces" the Kafkaesque to a matter of bureaucracy. That may be one sense of the expression, but Franz Kafka's "The Trial" and "In the Penal Colony", just to name two works, are as much about "maelstroms of lies" as they are about bureaucracy. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 3 July 2025)