Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal immigrant who has no right to be in the United States. He has admitted as much. But it was nonetheless unlawful for the Trump administration to deport him to his home country of El Salvador last month.
He is, as the liberal media call him, a “Maryland father” with no criminal record, but his wife accused him of domestic violence, and an immigration judge concluded he was a member of MS-13.
President Donald Trump is correct that a federal court cannot force the White House to repatriate Abrego Garcia, but Trump nevertheless appears to be blatantly violating a legal court order by not even trying.
Politicians, the news media, and countless commentators have mischaracterized aspects of Abrego Garcia’s case. The confusion comes from the complex nature of it, from the way in which facts have slowly trickled in, and from vastly different underlying views about immigration.
Many of Abrego Garcia’s defenders reject the notion that illegal immigrants, as illegal immigrants, have no right to be in the U.S.
Perhaps more fitting of public debate, though: Abrego Garcia’s various offenses do not justify the Trump administration’s ignoring of the law and a federal court ruling.
Illegal entry
Vice President JD Vance called Abrego Garcia “a gang member with no legal right to be in our country.” Liberal commentator Tim Miller wrote that Abrego Garcia was “a legal resident” of the U.S.
Miller is wrong, and Vance is overstepping on one of his two claims.
Abrego Garcia was an illegal immigrant who was never a legal resident. He admitted as much at his 2019 arrest. Vance is right that he had “no legal right to be in our country.”
Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 membership is less proven. That was a conclusion by local and federal law enforcement officials, which was accepted by an immigration judge, but it was not proven in a criminal court of law.
Here are the facts we know.
Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador over a decade ago and illegally entered the U.S. in 2012 at age 16 or 17. He said he walked across the desert to get to the U.S. border. He traveled to Prince George’s County, Maryland, where his two brothers lived as legal permanent residents. (PG is a suburb of Washington, D.C., and it includes some of the most Hispanic and immigrant-heavy neighborhoods in the mid-Atlantic.)
Aside from a couple of traffic violations, Abrego Garcia avoided the attention of law enforcement for about seven years. On March 28, 2019, at around 2:30 p.m., local police in Hyattsville, Maryland, approached Abrego Garcia along with three other immigrants in a Home Depot parking lot, a typical place where immigrant men wait to get picked up for day labor such as landscaping or residential construction work.
The local police called Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to the scene, where, according to an ICE report, Abrego Garcia and the others “freely admitted being citizens and nationals of El Salvador by birth and that they were present in the United States illegally.”
This point is not actually disputed in any court: Abrego Garcia was an illegal immigrant. He was never granted parole, and never in his 13 years here did he have legal permission to be here.
An immigration judge in April 2019 ordered Abrego Garcia detained until his deportation hearing.
In October 2019, an immigration judge ordered Abrego Garcia deported. That deportation order was never overturned and never expired. It still stands at this writing.
So why wasn’t Abrego Garcia ever removed from the country for the next five years? That involves the “withholding order” issued at the same time as the deportation order by the same immigration court in Baltimore.
Abrego Garcia argued that he couldn’t safely return to El Salvador because he and his family had for years been the target of harassment, threats, and extortion by a gang called Barrio 18.
He argued he faced “a clear probability of future persecution” if he were returned to El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia tried to use this account to plead asylum, which would have granted him legal status, but federal law is clear that an asylum-seeker needs to request asylum within a year of entering the country, and so the judge rejected that plea.
But Abrego Garcia succeeded in convincing the judge that returning to El Salvador was dangerous, and he won a “withholding order.” That order didn’t grant Abrego Garcia permission to stay in the U.S., but it did prohibit the federal government from sending him to El Salvador, which is exactly what the Trump administration unlawfully did last month.
Withholding order
The 2019 withholding order left Department of Homeland Security officials with two options for removing Abrego Garcia: They could either find a third country to send him to or try to convince an immigration judge to rescind the withholding order.
There is no established way to deport illegal immigrants to a third country in most cases. Simply dropping a Salvadoran in Honduras, Spain, or Kyrgyzstan would be a violation of that third country’s territorial sovereignty, and it would make the deportee an illegal immigrant there as well. To deport Abrego Garcia while the withholding order stood, the administration would have had to negotiate an agreement with some foreign government, such as Mexico. There’s no evidence the U.S. sought such an agreement for Abrego Garcia.
To deport Abrego Garcia to his home country, the administration would need to get the withholding order rescinded. In 2025, when Trump returned to office, ICE could have revisited that withholding order, arguing that Barrio 18 no longer posed a threat to Abrego Garcia.
There is real evidence of Barrio 18’s declining presence and influence in El Salvador. InSight Crime, a member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, reported in 2023 that Barrio 18 “has been greatly weakened in El Salvador following a nationwide security crackdown, launched by the Nayib Bukele government in March 2022. Security forces have jailed over 10,000 alleged Barrio 18 members during the crackdown, which has continued into 2023. Those still at large have gone into hiding or fled the country.”
Panama and Honduras are cooperating with the Bukele administration to capture, arrest, and extradite Barrio 18 gang members. Last April, Spanish police arrested a member of Barrio 18 and extradited him to El Salvador.
This latter process, arguing in immigration court that his withholding order was no longer valid, is part of what administration critics say was Abrego Garcia’s due process, a process ignored by the administration’s mass-deportation techniques and brushed away as too burdensome by top administration officials.
Instead, in March of this year, police pulled him over while he was driving home from work. They arrested him. DHS sent him to Texas and then put him on a plane with other Salvadoran illegal immigrants to ship him to the Terrorism Confinement Center in San Salvador.
The MS-13 accusation
Being an illegal immigrant isn’t enough to end up in a terrorist confinement center. The claim that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist rests on the Trump administration’s declaration that MS-13, a murderous gang, is a terrorist organization.
There is evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, but it’s a stretch to say there’s proof of it.
Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant secretary at DHS, asserted four pieces of evidence that Abrego Garcia was part of MS-13.
She claimed on X on April 16:
“1. When Garcia was arrested he was found with rolls of cash and drugs.
2. He was arrested with two other members of MS-13.
3. Two judges found that he was a member of MS-13. That finding has not been disturbed.
4. When arrested he was wearing what is effectively MS-13’s uniform.”
The first claim, that “he was found with rolls of cash and drugs,” is a bit misleading. He did have over $1,000 in cash on him, according to police reports, and local police say they saw someone in his party toss marijuana aside. But nobody accused Abrego Garcia of having possessed marijuana. In any event, by 2019, Maryland had decriminalized marijuana, and four loiterers in PG County smoking marijuana is hardly something that indicates gang membership.
Abrego Garcia’s outfit in March 2019 was evidence in his immigration court hearings the next month because the immigration judge was considering Abrego Garcia’s request to be freed on a $5,000 bond. The judge denied that request in part because “the evidence shows he is a verified member of MS-13.”
The immigration judge relied on statements from ICE, which relied on the PG County Gang Unit. Gang Unit officers “observed 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.”
(Note that the news media and one federal judge have misreported this as a “Bulls hat and hoodie.” It was not a Bulls hoodie.)
The police report says that “such clothing [is] indicative of the Hispanic gang culture” and that the hoodie’s illustration stood for “see no evil, hear no evil, and say no evil.”
“Wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents [that] they are a member in good standing with the MS-13,” the police report also stated.
One of the men arrested with Abrego Garcia had long been known as a gang member to PG police, and the other had gang tattoos, including “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil,” skull tattoos.
Finally, one Gang Unit detective reported that a confidential informant described as “a past proven and reliable source of information,” said Abrego Garcia was “an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” also relaying his rank and his gang name of “Chele.”
There are two possible holes in the confidential-informant part of the case. First, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys claim the Westerns clique operates only in New York, where Abrego Garcia has never lived.
(This assertion isn’t rock solid. “Westerns” appear to have historically operated in many parts of the U.S. A 2023 article on MS-13 in a liberal outlet reported on Westerns’ activity in Los Angeles, for instance.)
Secondly, the detective in the Gang Unit who reported the testimony from the confidential informant was fired from the force and charged with a crime after an ethics violation involving a prostitute he had hired.
At least one other problem hangs over the image of Abrego Garcia as a law-abiding “Maryland dad.”
Abrego Garcia was accused of domestic violence. In May 2021, a state court granted Jennifer Vasquez, Abrego Garcia’s wife, a temporary restraining order against him based on her accusation that he “punched and scratched” her, ripped off her shirt, and “grabbed and bruised her.”
These days, Vasquez is leading the lobbying effort for her husband’s return.
Righting wrongs
Much of the above is murky, but these two facts are known:
- Abrego Garcia was here illegally and had no legal right to remain in the U.S.
- It was unlawful for the Trump administration to send him to El Salvador without further due process.
This first fact undermines much of the news media narrative about Abrego Garcia, including the demands that he be returned home. Underlying that argument is a rarely stated but widely held belief in the news media that illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay here once they have established community or family ties.
This belief is not reflected in the law.
The second fact means the Trump administration broke the law. No derogatory comments about Abrego Garcia can make the deportation to El Salvador legal. Even if he were a drug-dealing, wife-beating, MS-13 gang member, the withholding order stood. If the Trump administration thought the withholding order was wrong, or that the conditions had changed, it could have and should have argued as much in immigration court.
That’s why a federal district court this month ordered the Trump administration to get Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S.
When the U.S. government breaks the law in a way that harms someone, it has a duty to rectify things.
When a federal court orders the executive to do something, the executive has a duty to do it. The Supreme Court has tweaked that ruling, saying that Trump must “facilitate” getting Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador.
Perhaps the DHS could get Abrego Garcia sent to a third country. Perhaps it could bring him back, get the withholding order rescinded, and then send him to El Salvador. But just leaving him there is illegal.
SOCIAL SECURITY IS IN WORSE SHAPE THAN YOU THINK
Trump has said he will just leave him there, though. This is hard to justify since Trump seems to have the respect of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, and Trump regularly brags about how much foreign leaders respect him. It seems Trump could just say, “Bukele, give me Abrego Garcia,” and Bukele would do it — or Trump would have to admit that he is not, in fact, respected by Third World leaders.
The administration is emphasizing information about Abrego Garcia’s violent past, his possible gang ties, and his illegal entry into the U.S. All of this pushes back on the media narrative of a peaceful “Maryland dad,” but none of it negates his right to due process and the administration’s obligation to follow the law.