A Maryland dad was sent to El Salvador prison by mistake. Can his community get him back?

BELTSVILLE, Md. − In just a few years, Kilmar Abrego Garcia built a comfortable life for himself in suburbia.

He landed a job as a sheet metal apprentice, married and had a son, and moved into a white-brick house in a middle-class neighborhood, where red and yellow tulips spring from the front lawn and a GMC pickup takes up space in the driveway, a boat hitched to its rear.

Finally, it seemed, he was living the American dream.

It ended in an Ikea parking lot last month.

Federal immigration agents pulled Abrego Garcia over on March 12 and arrested him as his 5-year-old autistic son, Kilmar Jr., watched from the back seat. Abrego Garcia, who had fled El Salvador as a teenager to escape gang violence, was expelled and sent back to his native land even though he had won a court order six years earlier barring his removal.

Abrego Garcia, 29, is being held in a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration admitted in court documents this week that his deportation was a mistake – an “administrative error” is the official explanation – but says it has no jurisdiction to order his return.

His heartbroken wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and their son, both U.S. citizens, have sued the government demanding his return. Besides his biological son, Abrego Garcia also is raising two stepchildren as his own.

“Kilmar, if you can hear me, I miss you so much,” Vasquez Sura said at a news conference Friday, holding back tears in front of a row of cameras and reporters. “I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children.”

The entire family has been "broken" by what, in the government's words, is "an error," she said.

"In the blink of an eye, our three children lost their father,” Vasquez Sura said. “And I lost the love of my life.”

The 5-year-old, who was born with an ear deformity and cannot verbally communicate, misses his father and has been extremely distressed since his arrest, said Lucia Curiel, one of the family’s lawyers.

“He's actually been seeking out his father's work clothes to smell them,” she said.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys say the U.S. government acted intentionally or recklessly in arresting and deporting him and needs to return him to American soil.

“This would be a very different case if Defendants came before the court hat in hand, confessing error and assuring the court that remedial steps were underway,” attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote in a court filing. “Instead, Defendants have already washed their hands of Plaintiff, of his U.S.-citizen wife, of his autistic nonverbal five-year-old U.S.-citizen child.”

U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland ruled Friday the government acted illegally when it deported Abrego Garcia and said he must be returned to the U.S.

'Everyone pays'

Abrego Garcia’s arrest and deportation have sparked outrage and fears in Beltsville, a diverse suburb about 30 minutes from Washington. A fast-growing Latino community in recent decades now accounts for more than 40% of the city’s population, the largest of any racial or ethnic group, according to census data.

Before his arrest, Abrego Garcia lived in a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes with large back and front yards, with trees blossoming in spring.

On the main thoroughfare through town, pupuserias, Latino markets and a Peruvian chicken shop are all within walking distance of his home.

In a parking lot for a Latino grocery store, a hair-braiding shop and a Chinese restaurant, Francisco Corpeno, 65, who is Salvadoran and has lived in the country for three decades, parked his towering Mack truck in a corner at lunch hour. He said the community is safe, though it had experienced violence and robberies in years past.

Now, he said, there’s fear of immigration enforcement. He specifically cited when agents wear vests presenting themselves as police but aren’t local law enforcement. He cited a recent action down U.S. Route 1 when someone was arrested just over a week ago.

Corpeno said he doesn’t mind if people committing crimes are removed, but it appears anyone who didn’t have identification or could be confused as being a gang member could be detained and deported.

“We’re not all criminals,” he said in Spanish. “But for one person, everyone pays.”

'I don't know anything about MS-13'

Abrego Garcia was among the hundreds of suspected members of crime gangs MS-13 and Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua the government expelled from the U.S. to El Salvador on March 15. He had won a court order from an immigration judge in 2019 that was supposed to prevent his removal.

Though the Trump administration attributes Abrego Garcia’s deportation to an error, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Tuesday that he was a suspected ringleader of MS-13 and human trafficker. She offered no evidence to back up the claim.

It wasn’t Abrego Garcia’s first brush with immigration authorities.

In March 2019, he was ordered deported after a confidential informant testified that he was an active member of the MS-13 gang, according to government lawyers.

But Curiel, who represented him in that case, said there is no evidence he was a member of MS-13, much less one of the group’s ringleaders. At the time he was detained, he was a day laborer, standing outside a Home Depot soliciting work with three other young men he barely knew, she said.

Prince George’s County police showed up and arrested all four, Curiel said. They didn’t talk to Abrego Garcia or tell him why he was being arrested, she said.

“He's not doing anything but standing there,” Curiel said. “They take him to the police station, begin to interrogate him about his supposed MS-13 ties. He is totally taken aback. He has never had any connection to MS-13. He denies (it), says he has no connection. They ask him to offer intel on MS-13. He says, ‘I don't have anything to offer because I don't know anything about MS-13.’”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were called in, and Abrego Garcia was taken into detention.

Authorities produced a gang field interview sheet that concluded he was a gang member, Curiel said. The evidence? “He was wearing a Chicago’s Bulls hat, which they say they know that only MS-13 members in good standing wear Chicago's Bulls hats,” she said.

Abrego Garcia also was wearing a hoodie that his wife had bought him, Curiel said, but authorities said the shirt was associated with or consistent with an MS-13 slogan. They also told him a confidential informant had named him as a member of the MS-13 Western clique, Curiel said, “which as I know, only ever existed in Long Island, New York, a state which he has never lived in.”

In court filings, Abrego Garcia testified he came to the United States because the Barrio 18 gang, which is rivals with MS-13, was extorting and threatening him and his family for their pupusa business in their San Salvador neighborhood and pressuring him to join the gang. The family fled the neighborhood. Eventually, when he was a teenager, Abrego Garcia’s parents sent him to the United States.

After the order to deport him, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum, asking for protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture if he were returned to El Salvador. An immigration judge found he was deportable but withheld his removal in October 2019.

Abrego Garcia struggled after his detention, Curiel said.

“He was extremely, extremely depressed” and had trouble getting out of bed, she said.

But life went on. He doted on his children, became active in a center for other dayworkers and eventually got the union apprenticeship as a sheet metal worker.

Then he was picked up by immigration agents again.

'I told him he would come back home'

On Wednesday afternoon, March 12, Abrego Garcia completed his shift at a new job site in Baltimore and picked up his 5-year-old son at the boy’s grandmother’s house.

With the child in the back seat, they headed home.

A few minutes later, his wife, Vasquez Sura, got the call. Abrego Garcia told her he had been pulled over for what he thought was a routine traffic stop, Vasquez Sura recounted in a court affidavit. He was in an Ikea parking lot near their home. His wife instructed him to put her on speakerphone while he was talking with police because he didn’t feel confident speaking English.

Vasquez Sura could overhear the conversation as an officer told her husband to turn off the car and get out. Abrego Garcia explained to the officer in English that his son with special needs was in the back seat. Vasquez Sura said she heard the officer take his phone and hang up.

Minutes later, she got another call, this time from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The caller gave her 10 minutes to get to the scene and pick up her son or child protective services would be contacted. When she arrived, Abrego Garcia was on the curb and in handcuffs, she said.

Officers said Abrego Garcia’s immigration status had changed and said they were taking him in. They asked if she wanted to tell him goodbye. Abrego Garcia was crying, she recalled.

“I told him he would come back home because he hadn’t done anything wrong,” she said.

But he didn’t.

Abrego Garcia was sent to Harlingen, Texas, and then flown to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Vasquez Sura recognized him among the other detainees in a video from the prison because of his tattoos and head scars, according to the family’s lawsuit.

Abrego Garcia’s arrest and deportation has left the family devastated and confused, Vasquez Sura said in a statement.

“Kilmar is an excellent father,” she said. “He has always been there for our three children and all of their needs. Two of them are on the autism spectrum, and our third has epilepsy. He has been the main provider of our household, and the love of my life for over seven years.”

Abrego Garcia was in his first of five years as an apprentice to get his pink ticket, or his union certificate, as a journeyman, said Tom Killeen, political director for the sheet metal workers union’s Local 100, based in Maryland, which Abrego Garcia joined. The union has called for the administration to release “Brother Kilmar.”

In his apprenticeship, he was receiving safety training and building other skills that would eventually allow him to work anywhere as a union member.

“He was on track, really, to the middle class,” Killeen said.

Abrego Garcia’s arrest has been condemned by immigrant rights advocates and others.

“ICE has admitted to deporting Kilmar to the very country that a judge ruled that Kilmar should not be deported because he would face persecution there,” said Ama Frimpong, legal director of CASA, a nonprofit immigrant rights group. “We cannot allow ICE’s egregious and unlawful actions to stand. We demand accountability, and we demand justice. This means bringing Kilmar back home to his family where he belongs.” 

Abrego Garcia’s 2019 case and his advocacy highlighted issues with immigrant communities, particularly Central Americans, who are profiled and falsely labeled as gang members, Frimpong said.

His case helped raise attention on the issue for CASA, Frimpong said. Once an individual is labeled as gang affiliated, it follows that person throughout their lives, Frimpong said.

“Even though there’s no evidence whatsoever that Kilmar was,” she said, “that initial labeling from years ago locally is still following him.”

The National Day Labor Organizing Network noted that while an immigration judge had protected him from deportation in 2019 because he was in danger from Salvadoran gangs, “Abrego Garcia had no protection from the gang led by the Trump White House.”

“Their assault on this innocent man is an assault on the whole immigration court system,” said Pablo Alvarado, the group’s co-executive director. “What part of ‘illegal’ don’t they understand?”

A community in fear

As rain sprinkled down Thursday morning, men from El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries waited around a Home Depot parking lot in Hyattsville – the same Home Depot where Abrego Garcia was arrested six years earlier while looking for a job.

Some helped people carry supplies to their cars in exchange for a cash tip or, if they were lucky, a day gig. The work was slower because of the rain, one worker told USA TODAY.

None of the men knew Abrego Garcia.

But they knew of his arrest.

Rigo Lemus, 25, stood beside a van as a woman sold tamales from its open trunk. A small boy played in the back of the vehicle as people came and ordered their food. Off to the side, Lemus’s mother chatted with other older women.

Lemus’ mother worries her son will be profiled because of his tattoos, which included a cross next to his right eye and a Playboy bunny on his neck. But Lemus said tattoos are art.

A cook who arrived in the U.S. from Guatemala when he was 8, Lemus said the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration enforcement has injected panic into Latino communities.

“En America, todos somos libres, dicen.” In America, they say, we're all free, Lemus said in Spanish.

But it doesn't seem like that anymore, he said. Now you have to hide as if you were a criminal.

Contributing: Nick Penzenstadler

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