Deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, a Salvadoran man living in the United States, was illegally deported on March 15, 2025, by the US government under the Trump administration, which called it "an administrative error". At the time, he had never been charged with or convicted of a crime in either country; despite this, he was imprisoned without trial in the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center. His case became the most prominent of the hundreds of migrants the US sent to be jailed without trial at CECOT under the countries' agreement where the US would pay the Salvadoran government to imprison US deportees there. The administration defended the deportation and accused Garcia of being a member of MS-13—a US-designated terrorist organization—based on a county police report mentioned during a 2019 immigration court bail proceeding. Abrego Garcia has denied the allegation.
Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador, and around 2011, at age 16, he illegally immigrated to the United States to escape gang threats. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal status due to the danger he would face from gang violence if he returned to El Salvador. This status allowed him to live and work legally in the US. At the time of his deportation in 2025, he lived in Maryland with his wife and children who are all American citizens, and he was complying with annual US Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-ins.
After Abrego Garcia was deported, his wife filed suit in Maryland asking that the US government return him to the US. The district court judge ordered the government to "facilitate and effectuate" his return. The government appealed, and on April 10, 2025, the Supreme Court stated unanimously that the government must "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return to the US. The administration interpreted "facilitate" to mean it was not obligated to seek his release, and it was up to El Salvador whether to release him.
On June 6, 2025, the federal government returned Abrego Garcia to the US, and the Department of Justice announced that he had been indicted in Tennessee for "conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain" and "unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain". He was jailed in Tennessee. A federal judge in Tennessee ruled that he could be released pending trial, but after his lawyers expressed concern that he might be immediately deported again, she ordered that he remain in prison for his own protection. On July 23, the Maryland and Tennessee courts simultaneously ordered that he be released from prison and prohibited his immediate deportation after release. A month later, he was released on bail and returned to Maryland. ICE officials warned that they intended to deport him to a third country and detained him a few days later. However, on December 11, he was released upon a federal judge's order.
Background
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in the Los Nogales neighborhood of San Salvador, El Salvador, in July 1995. In El Salvador, the Barrio 18 criminal gang extorted his mother's pupusa business for money and threatened that if she did not pay the money, they would force her eldest son, Cesar, to join the gang; the gang later threatened to kill him. As a result, the family paid the money and hid Cesar, eventually sending him to the United States. Barrio 18 then turned its attention to Kilmar, who was around 12 years old. The gang followed Kilmar and continued to threaten his family. Eventually, when Kilmar was 16 years old, his family sent him to the US as well. Court documents indicate that around 2011 or 2012, he illegally crossed the Mexico–US border near McAllen, Texas. In other court documents, the government stated that he entered the US "at or near an unknown place on or about an unknown date".From the US border, Abrego Garcia traveled to Maryland in order to live with his brother Cesar, who became a US citizen. In 2016, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a US citizen, and they later married. After marrying, the couple had one child, whom they raised alongside Vasquez Sura's two children from an earlier relationship. All three children have special needs; the son born to the couple has autism and a hearing defect, and is "unable to communicate verbally". Abrego Garcia lived in Maryland with his family, and at the time of his deportation had not been charged with or convicted of any criminal offense, including gang membership, in the US or El Salvador.
2019 detention and bond hearings
In March 2019, Abrego Garcia and three other men were stopped for loitering in Hyattsville, Maryland, in the parking lot of a Home Depot store where his lawyers say they were seeking work as day laborers. A Hyattsville Police Department incident report, which names the other men but not Abrego Garcia, said that an officer "approached them because he saw members of the group 'stashing something underneath a car'". The HPD incident report does not mention any suspicion of gang membership, but Ivan Mendez, a detective with the Prince George's County Police Department gang unit, said that the HPD officer contacted the gang unit because the officer recognized another of the men as a member of the MS-13 Sailors clique. MS-13, a rival of Barrio 18, began in immigrant communities in Los Angeles and has ties to several Central and South American countries. The Department of Justice has described MS-13 cliques as "smaller groups operating in a specific city or region". Several PGPD detectives with the gang unit interviewed the four men, and said they "had reasonable suspicion, based upon their training and experience", that Abrego Garcia and two of the other men "displayed traits associated with MS-13 gang culture", for which police cited tattoos, clothing, and "information from a source". None of the men were charged with any crime, and Abrego Garcia denied any connection to MS-13.Mendez was suspended from the PGPD in April 2019 for "misconduct in office" unrelated to the incident with Abrego Garcia. In 2021, the local prosecutor's office included Mendez in a "do not call" list of officers judged to be unreliable, and he was terminated in December 2022 after pleading guilty to misconduct and accepting the department's proposal of his termination.
The PGPD transferred custody of Abrego Garcia to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to initiate deportation proceedings, and the police department later said that it had no further interactions with him after the 2019 stop. The PGPD and ICE paperwork for Abrego Garcia included some inconsistencies, with the PGPD stating that he was picked up for loitering, and ICE stating that he was picked up in connection with a murder investigation. In addition, the ICE paperwork stated both that "Abrego-Garcia is not claiming fear of returning to his country" and that "Abrego-Garcia is claiming fear of returning to his home country of El Salvador." The government did not subsequently allege any connection to a murder investigation.
In the legal proceedings, the US government stated Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 because "he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations" when arrested, and alleged that such clothes are "indicative of the Hispanic gang culture". MS-13 had previously adopted the Chicago Bulls logo as a gang symbol. Vasquez Sura later said that the sweatshirt was a gift from her to Abrego Garcia, bought from Fashion Nova "because she liked the design", and The New York Times described that design as having images of "rolls of money and the face of Benjamin Franklinnot presidents, as the police report said". The Washington Post said the images were "Franklin's face as printed on the $100 bill" with "green bands covering the eyes, ears and mouth".
Officials also said they spoke to a "past and proven reliable confidential source" who "advised" them that Abrego Garcia was an active gang member with the moniker "Chele". The government said the informant alleged that Abrego Garcia was active with MS-13's Western clique, which, according to his immigration lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, is based in New York, where Abrego Garcia has never lived. Sandoval-Moshenberg cited the DOJ and the Suffolk County district attorney's office regarding the Western clique's location. However, Mia Cathell of the Washington Examiner noted that Prince George's County, where Abrego Garcia lived, is in the greater Washington, DC, area, and she cited an unrelated 2011 DOJ indictment that said six MS-13 cliques operated in that area in 2011, including the Western clique. The informant also said Abrego Garcia held the MS-13 rank of chequeo; according to MS-13 author Steven Dudley, chequeo is not a rank within MS-13 but refers to yet-to-be-initiated recruits.
Abrego Garcia requested a bond hearing, which the American Bar Association describes as "typically informal affairs, not substitutes for trial or even for discovery. Often the opposing parties simply describe to the judicial officer the nature of their evidence; they do not actually produce it." Elizabeth Kessler, the immigration judge who presided over the bond hearing, noted that some information provided by ICE and the PGPD appeared to be "at odds with" each other, but determined the informant's claim was sufficient evidence in support of his gang membership to deny Abrego Garcia's request for bond, and to hold him pending a full review. On appeal, a second judge upheld that ruling, finding that the claim was not clearly wrong. As a bond hearing decision, this was not a determination that he was a gang member, but instead limited to whether to release him from custody.
Vasquez Sura said the government had "absolutely no evidence" and "Kilmar is not and has never been a gang member". Abrego Garcia had never been charged with a crime, and The Washington Post reported that no court ever made a "full adjudication" of whether he was indeed a gang member.
In Abrego Garcia's hearing, neither the PGPD officers nor the confidential informant were cross-examined. Standards of evidence in US immigration hearings are lower than in trials: the government's claims are assumed to be true, while the burden of proof rests with the defendant. Additionally, "Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien" forms—which consist largely of hearsay and are thus inadmissible in other proceedings—are admissible in immigration courts and are considered "inherently trustworthy".