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Boston Globe
20-04-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
How a defunct gang registry helped deliver Kilmar Abrego García to a Salvadoran prison
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Yet federal officials are bucking a Maryland District Court judge's orders to facilitate Abrego García's return — and have launched a full-throated effort outside of court to label him a gang member, a 'terrorist' and a 'human trafficker.' Advertisement 'Abrego García is an illegal alien MS-13 gang member and foreign terrorist,' Trump said during a White House news briefing Friday, citing a dossier on Abrego García his administration has widely circulated during the past week. 'This is the man that the Democrats are wanting us to fly back from El Salvador to be a happily ensconced member of the USA family.' Advertisement To date, the only evidence federal authorities have produced in court to support such allegations is the Maryland police detective's 2019 gang sheet. But a Washington Post review of court documents and other public records found that attorneys and judges have questioned the integrity of the allegations in that document since it was written. The detective who filled out the gang sheet — Ivan Mendez — was suspended from the Prince George's County Police Department days after detaining Abrego García because he'd been accused of tipping off a sex worker he had hired about an ongoing investigation into a brothel she ran. He was later criminally indicted and fired after pleading guilty to misconduct in office, one of several members of the gang unit who were criminally prosecuted. Mendez did not respond to messages seeking comment. A rally takes place April 15 outside the US District Court for the District of Maryland in Greenbelt, Maryland, in support of Abrego García. Maansi Srivastava/for the Washington Post The gang unit in Prince George's County, whose residents are majority Black and Latino, stopped using the Gang Field Interview Sheet as a source of intelligence gathering about three years ago, amid a civil lawsuit that alleged young men of color were disproportionately represented in it. And in January, federal officials in the Washington region decommissioned GangNET, a database of alleged gang members that those field sheets fed into, because participation drastically tapered as its credibility came into question. Lucia Curiel, an attorney who represented Abrego García after the 2019 encounter, said he fled gang threats in El Salvador as a teenager and had no contact with police before the Home Depot arrest. If not for Mendez's allegations, she said, Abrego García would not have been on ICE's radar. 'It's the direct through line to what's happening today,' Curiel said. 'All the evidence, or lack thereof, suggests this is the single source of the allegation, and the allegation is the single reason he was deported and sent to CECOT. The two agencies to blame are the Trump administration and the Prince George's County Police Department.' Advertisement The gang unit The Prince George's County Police Department has long faced allegations that the agency's tactics targeted Black and Latino people. From 2004 to 2009, the department was placed under federal oversight after the agency was investigated for canine unit brutality and shooting more people than any other police department in the country. A group of Black and Latino officers sued the department in 2018, alleging police leaders discriminated against officers of color and enabled racist behaviors that harmed residents. Last year, the department was sued again over the gang unit and its use of the GangNET database after community members repeatedly complained that officers were racially profiling young Latino men and incorrectly labeling them as gang members. The department began participating in the database in 2012, after receiving a multimillion-dollar federal grant from the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, known as HIDTA, which hosted and maintained it. The county had developed a Gang Field Interview Sheet to collect information on suspected gang affiliates, said a former member of the gang unit who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Related : Officials from HIDTA, which coordinates task forces between local and federal law enforcement to combat drug trafficking, trained county officers on the federal codes and regulations guiding the database. The gang unit detectives did not have the power to directly enter data into GangNET, the former gang unit member said, but the information came directly from their field reports with no built-in vetting. Advertisement The gang unit was incentivized to fill the database, said the former member, because intelligence gathering was a core function of the grant funding. When the gang unit's leadership changed in the mid-2010s, the officer said, standards fell. Expectations shifted to 'you better be submitting names, or you won't last in the gang unit,' the officer said, citing conversations with other gang unit members. 'If you're not submitting names, then your career, your time in that unit is very limited.' Some officers in the gang unit lacked cultural understanding, the officer said, and Latino residents were 'looked at a certain way.' If someone wore 'a certain type of clothing' or had a 'certain type of tattoo,' he said, 'they were going to get … stopped and then interviewed and then put in the system.' Attorneys representing those apprehended by the gang unit saw those patterns. Curiel said she and her colleagues at Amica Center for Immigrant Rights - who were representing people in deportation proceedings — realized nearly a dozen cases started the same way. Young men, some of them teenagers, were stopped by police but rarely charged with a crime. A member of the Prince George's County gang unit — often Mendez — would fill out a Gang Interview Field Sheet, she said. Then, local officers would notify ICE. A Prince George's County police cruiser in 2022. Eric Lee/For The Washington Post Curiel flagged her observations to the immigration advocacy group CASA, which notified the county council's only Latino member at the time, Deni Taveras. Together, they began campaigning for transparency around the database, an effort that Curiel took to court when she was asked in the spring of 2019 to represent a man named Kilmar Abrego García. Advertisement The gang sheet On March 28, 2019, Abrego García drove to a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, and stood outside the day laborer's entrance looking for work. Three other Latino men in their 20s were already there, according to police records. Abrego García did not know them well, his attorneys said. A Hyattsville Police Department detective approached the others in the group. Within minutes, members of the Prince George's County police gang unit arrived — and put all of them, including Abrego García, in handcuffs. An incident report from Hyattsville police names the other three men, but not Abrego García, and says the detective approached them because he saw members of the group 'stashing something underneath a car' in the parking lot — which Mendez later said were small plastic bottles containing marijuana. The Hyattsville report makes no mention of suspected gang activity. The field interview sheet — the only record Prince George's police claims it has from that day — offers a different narrative. Mendez wrote that the Hyattsville detective had recognized a man in the group as a member of the MS-13 Sailors clique. That man, court records show, was on probation at the time after being convicted of misdemeanor assault and participating in gang activity, charges that had stemmed from a fight at a shopping mall. Another man was labeled a high-ranking gang member because of a tattoo featuring horns, and Mendez called a third man a potential recruit because he was standing nearby. Abrego García, Mendez wrote, had been identified by an unnamed confidential informant as an 'active member' of MS-13's Western clique in Upstate New York — a place he has never lived. Mendez cited Abrego García's clothes as further proof, including a hooded sweatshirt that featured green bands covering the eyes, ears and mouth of Benjamin Franklin's face as printed on the $100 bill. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, would later say she bought him the sweatshirt — for sale on FashionNova — because she liked the design. Advertisement While all four men were detained and questioned, none were ever charged with a crime, according to court documents. During hours of questioning, Abrego García repeatedly denied gang membership, according to court documents. Prince George's police officers told Abrego García that he would be released if he provided information about other gang members, according to his attorney, but he could not because he did not have any. Then police handed Abrego García over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who arrested him for being in the country illegally. Related : A month later, at Abrego García's bond hearing before Immigration Judge Elizabeth Kessler, a Justice Department attorney argued that he was a flight risk and public safety threat — citing solely the allegations in Mendez's report. The government attorney also submitted a federal form claiming Abrego García and one of the other men at Home Depot had been 'detained in connection to a murder investigation.' The Post could find no mention of a murder investigation in any other public records, and Prince George's County police did not respond to questions about other investigations involving Abrego García or the agency's Gang Unit. At the hearing, Kessler noted that discrepancy - expressing reservations about the strength of the evidence linking Abrego García to gang activity. 'I am not particularly concerned about the conclusions that there may be an indicia of gang membership from clothing,' she said, according to a transcript of the hearing. 'The respondent can certainly wear whatever he wants in this country and I will be reluctant to place any weight on that.' Still, Kessler said she was 'very seriously concerned' by the sheet filled out by Mendez and ultimately denied Abrego García bond. For the next three months, Abrego García sat in ICE detention. At his August 2019 deportation hearing, Abrego García and Vasquez Sura — who had married through a glass partition at the ICE detention center — testified for two days before Judge David M. Jones, a Trump administration appointee. Abrego García told the judge that as a teen in El Salvador, the Barrio 18 gang attempted to extort his mother's pupusa business, then recruit him and his brother into their ranks - threatening to kill them if they didn't join. When given the chance to make their case regarding Abrego García's alleged gang ties, the federal government produced just one piece of evidence: the Prince George's County gang field interview sheet. Curiel's own attempts to question the gang unit officers were thwarted. The county police department's inspector general told her Mendez wasn't available because, just days after Abrego García's detention, he had been suspended regarding the sex worker investigation. Other gang unit officers declined to discuss Abrego García's case unless compelled by a judge. The Hyattsville detective, Curiel said in court papers, never returned her calls. In his Oct. 10 ruling, Jones granted Abrego García withholding of removal, a protection available to migrants who face likely persecution or harm if returned to their country. Jones did not comment on the government's allegations that Abrego García was a gang member but said his testimony about safety fears was credible. The ruling was rare for the former military judge, who has an above average denial rate for asylum cases, according to court data. Federal officials under the first Trump administration did not appeal. On Oct. 23, 2019, Abrego García was released from custody and ordered to check in with ICE annually. Records reviewed by The Post show he fully complied. Shortly after his release, the Prince George's County Council voted unanimously to bar all county agencies from engaging in immigration enforcement. Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Abrego García, weeps as Sen. Van Hollen holds a news conference April 18. Pete Kiehart/For The Washington Post A two-fronted battle Five years later, Abrego García was driving in Prince George's with his 5-year-old autistic son when he was pulled over by ICE officers. Abrego García called his wife on speakerphone, she said, and agents told Vasquez Sura she had 10 minutes to pick up their son or he would be turned over to Child Protective Services. When she arrived, ICE officers said his immigration status had changed and asked if she wanted to say goodbye. Abrego García was crying. The next day, on March 13, he called her from detention in Louisiana and said ICE agents had showed him photos they'd secretly taken of him at a restaurant and basketball court, asking him to identify people in the background. But Abrego García said he didn't know them. On March 15, from a Texas detention center, Abrego García called his wife again in a panic. He was being deported to El Salvador. Vasquez Sura hired two new attorneys: one in El Salvador, who could find no criminal charges pending there, and one in Maryland, who filed a lawsuit in US District Court. The judge overseeing that case, Paula Xinis, has repeatedly ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego García's return — a ruling largely affirmed by a federal appeals court and the US Supreme Court. The government's gang allegations, Xinis said in one ruling, are unsubstantiated. The Trump administration has turned to the court of public opinion. This week, Attorney General Pam Bondi released what she described as evidence of Abrego García's MS-13 ties, all of it based on the Prince George's Gang Field Interview Sheet. The Department of Homeland Security unearthed and posted to social media a court petition Vasquez Sura filed against Abrego García in 2021 that stated he struck her during an argument, saying it proved he was violent. Vasquez Sura, who never followed up on the petition, said the altercation stemmed from the emotional and psychological trauma her husband experienced during the 2019 ICE detention. 'Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father,' she said, 'and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.' As proof of their allegations that Abrego García is a 'human trafficker,' Trump officials also released a DHS investigative report regarding a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee — which also cites the Prince George's gang allegations. It wasn't immediately clear when the report, which has no date but appears to have been printed on Thursday, was produced. It alleges that Abrego García was pulled over for speeding by a Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper, according to the report. He told the trooper that the seven other men in the van, owned by his boss, were fellow construction workers he was driving from Texas back to Maryland. The trooper, according to the DHS investigative report, said a lack of luggage in the van made him suspect potential labor trafficking. The trooper ran his name and saw an instruction to notify federal authorities, according to the Tennessee Highway Patrol. But federal officials who were contacted said there was no need to detain him, the agency said, and Abrego García was issued a warning for driving with an expired driver's license and released. No other charges were filed. On Thursday, the US Court of Appeals excoriated the Trump administration. 'The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,' the appeals court wrote. 'The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.' Steve Thompson, Maria Sacchetti and Jeremy Roebuck contributed to this report.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Yahoo
CECOT Forever
DOJ tries to prove Abrego Garcia is part of MS-13: Attorney General Pam Bondi has decided that instead of working to facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) as the Supreme Court has ordered, she will instead take to X to release documents from his 2019 arrest, in which a detective claimed he was an MS-13 member. That's one approach, I guess. These documents had already been publicly available, if you cared to look through the prior court proceedings. The Gang Field Interview Sheet, drafted up by Ivan Mendez, then an officer with the Prince George's County Police Department, says Abrego Garcia was arrested with purported MS-13 members in a Home Depot parking lot, that he was wearing clothing that they believe to be affiliated with MS-13 ("a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations" which "officers know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture"), and that a confidential informant said he was part of MS-13. Interestingly, reporting by The New Republic notes that Mendez was suspended the next month for "providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts." ("The information he provided focused on an on-going police investigation," per the county's news release.) Information has also come out about Abrego Garcia allegedly beating his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, stemming from a protection order she filed against him in 2021: "At this point, I am afraid to be close to him," she wrote in the protection order. "I have multiple photos/videos of how violent he can be and all the bruises he [has] left me." She cites specific examples from August 2020 and November 2020 in which he was violent toward her. Vasquez Sura told CNN that "she sought a civil protective order in 2021 after a disagreement with Abrego Garcia" and that "she had survived a previous relationship that included domestic violence." She says she did not appear at a court hearing and pursue the matter further: "We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling." Working through marital troubles—even when violence is involved—appears to be something the vice president sorta…supports: "Culturally, something has clearly shifted. I think it's easy but also probably true to blame the sexual revolution of the 1960s," J.D. Vance said in 2022. "My grandparents had an incredibly chaotic marriage in a lot of ways, but they never got divorced, right? They were together to the end, 'til death do us part. That was a really important thing to my grandmother and my grandfather. That was clearly not true by the 70s or 80s." (Vance has written elsewhere about his grandparents' marriage turning violent at times.) "Based on the sensationalism of many of the people in this room, you would think we deported a candidate for Father of the Year," snarked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Leavitt commented from the podium that "it's appalling and sad that Sen. [Chris] Van Hollen [D–Md.] and the Democrats applauding his trip to El Salvador today are incapable of having any shred of common sense or empathy for their own constituents and our citizens," before gesturing to Patty Morin, a woman whose daughter was brutally murdered by an illegal immigrant in 2023. "Nobody knows this more than the woman standing to my right, Patty Morin," added Leavitt. Whether Rachel Morin or Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student killed by an illegal immigrant while jogging, the administration keeps implying that you cannot both support due process for Abrego Garcia and have empathy for the victims of violence from illegal immigrants. (I think people can hold multiple ideas in their heads at once.) None of this really matters in terms of what the U.S. government is obligated to do: The Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return. The administration continues to demur on this front, instead choosing to release, via X…the protective order Vasquez Sura filed: Of course, most people are neither angels nor demons, and even very bad and violent people—if that is what Abrego Garcia is—deserve due process. The punishment for wifebeating in Maryland, or entering the country illegally, is not indefinite confinement in a Salvadoran prison. He has not just been deported, he has been locked up in CECOT. ("A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world," writes The New York Times' Ezra Klein. "It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador's so-called justice minister, is a coffin.") More specifically, if the administration is trying to deport the man under the Alien Enemies Act, he is entitled to a habeas hearing to confront the charges that he's an MS-13 member (as Glenn Greenwald details below). Even if the idea that Abrego Garcia deserves due process is uncompelling to you, zoom out for a second and consider the many other people who have been sent to CECOT without the ability to contest the charges against them, unsure if they will ever be released. This isn't deportation. This is cruelty to make a political point (as some resistance types would claim during Trump 1.0): Don't come here. If you're already here illegally, be afraid. After all, home-growns are next. Israel had wanted to strike Iran's nuclear sites: Over the last few weeks, Trump administration officials apparently dissuaded Israel from attacking Iran's nuclear sites. "Israeli officials had recently developed plans to attack Iranian nuclear sites in May," reports The New York Times. "They were prepared to carry them out, and at times were optimistic that the United States would sign off. The goal of the proposals, according to officials briefed on them, was to set back Tehran's ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more." Essentially, President Donald Trump communicated to Israel that the U.S. would not support them in their plans, while opening up greater lines of communication with Iran possibly to negotiate a new deal related to its nuclear program (the former nuclear deal, negotiated by President Barack Obama, was shredded by Trump during his first term in 2018, but it looks a bit like second-term Trump might settle for something that looks rather similar). Looked at one way, you could say Trump's approach is a bit schizophrenic, with administration officials not totally aligned on which goals they're actually pursuing. Looked at another, you could say the less-hawkish forces are exerting significant influence behind the scenes, which bodes well. Mayoral candidate (and current state representative) Zohran Mamdani plans to increase corporate taxes by 4.5 percent, which he predicts would add $5.4 billion to city coffers. "Another $4 billion would come from the increased taxes on the wealthy, with additional income flowing in by beefing up the city's tax collection agency," adds The New York Post. Mamdani advocates city-run grocery stores, expanded free childcare, fare-free buses, and rent freezes. He also seems to believe that you can just levy infinite taxes on the wealthy without them ever wising up, moving their money elsewhere, or fleeing the city altogether. "SpaceX is leading a bid to build Golden Dome with startups Anduril and Palantir, six people said," reports Reuters, which would include "a constellation of 400 to more than 1,000 missile defense satellites." "A team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a star 120 light-years from Earth," reports The New York Times. "A repeated analysis of the exoplanet's atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae. 'It is in no one's interest to claim prematurely that we have detected life,' said Nikku Madhusudhan, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge and an author of the new study, at a news conference on Tuesday. Still, he said, the best explanation for his group's observations is that K2-18b is covered with a warm ocean, brimming with life. 'This is a revolutionary moment,' Dr. Madhusudhan said. 'It's the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.'" This is really disturbing: Agree: The post CECOT Forever appeared first on
Al Jazeera
15-04-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Did US courts back Kilmar Abrego Garcia's El Salvador deportation?
President Donald Trump's April 14 public meeting with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele centred on the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. Trump administration officials and Bukele said Abrego Garcia would not be returned to the US, four days after the US Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration must facilitate Abrego Garcia's return. On March 15, the US government deported Abrego Garcia to CECOT, a Salvadoran mega-prison where Trump has sent hundreds of Salvadoran and Venezuelan men who were previously in the US. But Abrego Garcia had protection that was supposed to prevent him from being deported to El Salvador. The Justice Department called Abrego Garcia's deportation an 'oversight' and 'an administrative error' in a court filing. During the Oval Office meeting, Bukele and several Trump administration officials made misleading statements about Abrego Garcia's case and the role the US and El Salvador's governments are playing in his potential return. Here are the facts. That's what Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed. 'In 2019, two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court, ruled that (Abrego Garcia) was a member of MS-13,' she said at the White House. This needs context. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Abrego Garcia in 2019 as he was looking for day labour outside a Home Depot store in Maryland. A police informant told police Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 member. Immigration judges denied Abrego Garcia bond, both initially and on appeal, citing the informant's accusation. In the initial denial, the judge said the determination of Abrego Garcia's gang membership 'appears to be trustworthy and is supported' by evidence from the Gang Field Interview Sheet which, in part, referenced the informant. Abrego Garcia's lawyers have repeatedly said in court that the informant's accusation was fabricated. The immigration judges' decision to deny bond is not equivalent to ruling that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said. In immigration bond hearings, detainees have the burden of proof to show they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. Abrego Garcia 'failed to meet his burden to show that he was not a danger,' Bier said. That's not the same as the government proving affirmatively that he was an MS-13 member. 'The immigration judge is only taking at face value any evidence that the government provides,' Bier said. 'It is not assessing its underlying validity at that stage.' Abrego Garcia later received an immigration protection called withholding of removal. Granting that protection required the Department of Homeland Security to decide Abrego Garcia was not 'a danger to the security of the United States', Bier said, citing US immigration law. 'The Trump administration did not appeal these determinations or the granting of withholding of removal,' Bier said. 'So at that time, it did not consider him a threat and no new evidence has been presented since then.' Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a lawyer for Abrego Garcia, said his client has 'never been convicted of any crime, gang-related or otherwise'. Neither of the immigration court proceedings constitute a conviction, because they were not trials. 'When President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organisation, that meant that (Abrego Garcia) was no longer eligible, under federal law … for any form of immigration relief in the United States,' White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said. It's inaccurate that the US government's February designation of MS-13 as a foreign terrorist organisation automatically revoked Abrego Garcia's protection from removal, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said. People who are proven members of a terrorist organisation are ineligible for protection from removal. But in Abrego Garcia's case, to revoke his protections, the US government 'would have been required under law to reopen his immigration court proceedings and prove to the judge that he was a member of MS-13 and therefore no longer eligible for withholding'. 'The government certainly could have sought to prove that (Abrego Garcia) was not eligible for any form of immigration relief, but it did not do so,' Bier said. Asked by a journalist whether El Salvador would return Abrego Garcia to the US, the country's President Nayib Bukele said doing so would be akin to 'smuggling a terrorist into the United States'. There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist. It's unproven that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 and therefore a terrorist after the gang's foreign terrorist designation. Abrego Garcia is being held in a Salvadoran prison at the US government's request, not because he committed a crime in El Salvador, Reichlin-Melnick said. Therefore, Bukele could release Abrego Garcia and the US government could grant him humanitarian parole 'as part of the court order requiring them to facilitate his return', Reichlin-Melnick added. Yes, according to Miller. 'We won (the Supreme Court) case 9-0 and people like CNN are portraying it as a loss,' he said. But that is misleading. On April 10, the Supreme Court ruled, in an unsigned order, that the US government had to ''facilitate' Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador'. The Supreme Court also asked the lower court to 'clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs'. The lower court had ordered that the US 'facilitate and effectuate' Abrego Garcia's release. On April 11, the federal judge said the US government had 'failed to comply' with the court's order and ordered the government to submit daily updates on Abrego Garcia's location and what steps the government has taken to facilitate his return. Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.
