Innocent Father or MS-13 Gang Member?
Who is Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia? If you ask the left, he’s an innocent father of three (one biological kid, two step-kids) who lives in Maryland, has no criminal record, and was wrongly deported to El Salvador’s most notorious prison, CECOT, or the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. If you ask the right, he’s a dangerous MS-13 member who was in the country illegally, has made only bullshit asylum claims, and does not deserve to live in our country. Who’s telling the truth?
Here’s what we know to be true: Abrego Garcia had been in the U.S. since 2012, living under protected legal status—withholding of removal, which protects him from deportation back to El Salvador due to likelihood that he’d be persecuted there—since 2019, married to a U.S. citizen, with a 5-year-old autistic child. He has no criminal record here. He worked in construction for years, soliciting in Home Depot parking lots, and finally got a job as a sheet metal apprentice about a year ago. On March 12, he was stopped and informed by ICE agents that his status had changed. On March 15, he “was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” say attorneys with the Justice Department. Now he’s at CECOT, the notorious prison in rural El Salvador, touted by President Nayib Bukele as an option for the U.S. government to send deportees.
Contra the DOJ, which says he was wrongly removed to El Salvador, Vice President J.D. Vance says Abrego Garcia “was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here” and that “it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”
Abrego Garcia’s wife is suing the Trump administration and asking a judge to order the U.S. government to get the government of El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia.
Here’s what’s claimed by each side: In court documents from 2019—seven years after entering the country, once stopped by law enforcement—Abrego Garcia says his family had attracted the attention of local gangs (Barrio 18) in El Salvador because they ran a successful pupusa business while he was growing up. His parents reportedly went to great lengths to protect their sons from being handed over to those gangs. The family moved over and over again to try to escape extortion.
Abrego Garcia’s case was compelling to a judge, who dinged him for failing to make an asylum claim within the one-year deadline but ended up granting him withholding of removal—protection from being deported back to El Salvador, described by some as “asylum lite“—because of a credible threat of persecution there.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, says he is a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, which has been designated a foreign terrorist organization. Abrego Garcia’s lawyer claims the gang allegation is false and that they are due to “a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland,” per reporting by The Atlantic. (“During questioning
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