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Al Jazeera
3 days ago
- General
- Al Jazeera
Why Trump and Bukele are destroying Kilmar Abrego Garcia's life
In March, the United States government deported to El Salvador 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had lived and worked in the US for almost half his life. Little did he know that he would soon be the face of US President Donald Trump's sinisterly exuberant mass deportation campaign. Married to US citizen Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia was detained while driving in Maryland with the couple's five-year-old autistic son, who got to witness his father's capture by the US forces of law and order and has apparently been severely traumatised as a result. In a subsequent court affidavit, Vasquez Sura said her son, who cannot speak, had been 'very distressed' by the 'sudden disappearance of his father', crying more than usual and 'finding Kilmar's work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar's familiar scent'. Of course, tearing families apart and traumatising children has long been par for the bipartisan course in everyone's favourite 'land of the free', although Trump has certainly made more of a sensational spectacle out of it than his Democratic predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Anyway, there is nothing like sowing a bunch of fear and psychological trauma in the name of national security, right? Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador along with more than 200 other people, who shared the honour of serving as demonised guinea pigs in the Trump administration's current experiments in sadistic countermigration policy. The deportees were swiftly interned in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the notorious mega-prison built by Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's self-described 'coolest dictator in the world'. The facility houses thousands of people arrested under the nationwide 'state of emergency', which was declared in 2022 and shows no sign of abating. Under the pretence of fighting a war on gangs, Bukele has imprisoned more than 85,000 Salvadorans – over 1 percent of the country's population – in an array of jails that often function as blackholes in terms of indefinitely disappearing human beings as well as any notion of human and legal rights. And now that incoming US funds and deportees have boosted El Salvador's international carceral clout along with Bukele's tough-guy image, there is even less of a rush to end the 'emergency'. Meanwhile, the case of Abrego Garcia in particular has provided both Trump and Bukele with an extended opportunity to showcase their mutual passion for sociopathy and disdain for the law. As it so happens, Abrego Garcia's deportation to El Salvador occurred in direct violation of a 2019 ruling by a US immigration judge, according to which he could not be deported to his native country on account of the dangers that such a move would pose to his life. Indeed, Abrego Garcia fled to the US as a teenager, precisely out of fear for his life following gang threats to his family. And although the US government was quickly forced to acknowledge that his deportation in March had occurred 'because of an administrative error', the Trump-Bukele team remains determined not to rectify it. After all, this would set a dangerous precedent in suggesting that the possibility of recourse to justice does in fact exist, and that asylum seekers in the US should not have to live in terror of being spontaneously disappeared to El Salvador by 'administrative error'. As per a recent New York Times article exposing the details of the debate within the Trump administration over how to manage the PR side of the Abrego Garcia blunder before it became public, officials from the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 'discussed trying to portray Mr. Abrego Garcia as a 'leader' of the violent street gang MS-13, even though they could find no evidence to support the claim'. But a lack of evidence has never stopped folks who are not concerned with facts and reality in the first place. Trump officials have continued to insist on Abrego Garcia's affiliation with MS-13, while the president himself has unabashedly invoked a doctored photograph of tattoos on the man's knuckles. The administration has also relied heavily on the fact that, in 2019, the police department in Prince George's County, Maryland, decided that Abrego Garcia was a gang member because he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat, among other oh-so-incriminating behaviour. To be sure, the frequency with which US law enforcement outfits cite Chicago Bulls merchandise as alleged proof of gang membership would be laughable given the US basketball team's massive domestic and international fanbase – if, that is, such preposterous profiling tendencies did not directly translate into physical and psychological torment for Abrego Garcia and countless other individuals. In April, the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's return to the US. In addition to thus far failing to comply with that order, the administration has gone to ludicrous lengths to defy a separate order from US District Judge Paula Xinis that it provide details about what exactly it is doing to secure Abrego Garcia's release. Apparently irked by Judge Xinis's pushiness, Trump administration officials then went with the good old 'state secrets' excuse, which would enable the withholding of information regarding Abrego Garcia's case in order to safeguard 'national security' and the 'safety of the American people', as DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin put it. Bukele, for his part, has handled the Abrego Garcia situation with a petulant and vengeful machismo befitting the world's 'coolest dictator', taking to X to ridicule the wrongfully abducted and imprisoned man. During an April visit to his partner in crime in the Oval Office in Washington, Bukele made clear to reporters that he would not be lifting a finger on Abrego Garcia's behalf: 'How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?' Speaking of terrorism, it is worth recalling that, long before the current 'state of emergency' in El Salvador, the US had an outsized hand in supporting right-wing state terror in the country, where the civil war of 1979-92 killed more than 75,000 people. The majority of wartime atrocities were committed by the US-backed Salvadoran military and allied death squads, and countless Salvadorans fled north to the US, where MS-13 and other gangs formed as a means of communal self-defence. Following the war's end, the US undertook the mass deportation of gang members to a freshly devastated nation, paving the way for continued violence, migration, and deportation and culminating, of course, in the world's coolest dictatorship. As they say, nothing fuels the consolidation of power and evisceration of rights like a solid 'terrorist' enemy – and at the present moment, Abrego Garcia holds the dubious distinction of serving as that enemy for not one but two sociopathic heads of state. At the end of the day, though, Abrego Garcia is no Osama bin Laden; he is just a random guy whose calculated torment is meant as a warning to anyone who might be feeling too confident in the rule of law. Trump has already proposed sending US citizens to El Salvador for incarceration, as well – and to hell with any semblance of legality. To that end, the president has proposed that Bukele build more prisons, a project that presumably will not require much arm-twisting. Now, as the US government goes about annihilating the rights of foreign nationals and legal citizens alike, it is safe to assume that no one is safe. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Maryland father mistakenly deported to Salvadoran prison really did flee to avoid MS-13 gang, his teacher and a classmate said
A Maryland father who was erroneously deported back to El Salvador really did flee his home country to avoid gang recruitment, school records obtained by The Washington Post show. There is no official evidence linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the MS-13 gang, despite repeated claims from Donald Trump's administration. The president and administration officials claim Abrego Garcia's tattoos are evidence of alleged gang ties, but law enforcement officials and gang experts say they do not definitively indicate any gang affiliation. Although the Salvadoran boy was of prime age to be recruited by MS-13, like many boys in his neighborhood, Abrego Garcia was not one of them, his teacher and a classmate said in the report provided to The Washington Post. School records from 2003 to 2011 reportedly state that Abrego Garcia consistently demonstrated 'very good conduct.' His friends, however, did become concerned during his school years that Abrego Garcia may be having issues at home. 'He seemed sad, like his mind was on something else,' an anonymous classmate told the outlet. Abrego Garcia fled to the United States in 2011 at age 16 to join his older brother after gang threats against him and his family, according to his attorneys. Last month, Abrego Garcaa's wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura told The Washington Post that her husband's fears from childhood followed him for years, making him cry and sweat in his sleep. 'He never talked about them, but I could see it,' Vasquez Sura said. Following a March traffic stop, Abrego Garcia was detained by federal agents and deported to El Salvador's brutal Terrorism Confinement Center despite a court order preventing his removal from the country. He was later transferred to a Salvadoran prison for non-gang members. He had been working as a sheet-metal apprentice and living with his wife and their 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens, along with two other children from a previous relationship. Last month, District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's return to the United States. The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Xinis's ruling and called his removal 'illegal.' Xinis has since clashed with government attorneys as they push to withhold details on what, if anything, has been done to return him. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador to meet Abrego Garcia as members of Congress demand the administration return him to U.S. soil, where government attorneys can present evidence against him to support his removal. Maryland Rep. Glenn Ivey is now traveling to El Salvador to try and meet with Abrego Garcia. 'The court orders for him to come back so that he can have his day in court,' Ivey told WBAL News Radio. 'We're not afraid of him having his day in court. That's what due process is all about. He needs to be brought back so he can have his day in court.' Republicans have opposed efforts to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States, citing allegations of criminality and a protective order filed by his wife in 2020, which she later rescinded. Ivey is expected to return from El Salvador on Tuesday.
The Independent
24-05-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Maryland father mistakenly deported to Salvadoran prison really did flee to avoid MS-13 gang, his teacher and a classmate said
A Maryland father who was erroneously deported back to El Salvador really did flee his home country to avoid gang recruitment, school records obtained by The Washington Post show. There is no official evidence linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the MS-13 gang, despite repeated claims from Donald Trump 's administration. The president and administration officials claim Abrego Garcia's tattoos are evidence of alleged gang ties, but law enforcement officials and gang experts say they do not definitively indicate any gang affiliation. Although the Salvadoran boy was of prime age to be recruited by MS-13, like many boys in his neighborhood, Abrego Garcia was not one of them, his teacher and a classmate said in the report provided to The Washington Post. School records from 2003 to 2011 reportedly state that Abrego Garcia consistently demonstrated 'very good conduct.' His friends, however, did become concerned during his school years that Abrego Garcia may be having issues at home. 'He seemed sad, like his mind was on something else,' an anonymous classmate told the outlet. Abrego Garcia fled to the United States in 2011 at age 16 to join his older brother after gang threats against him and his family, according to his attorneys. Last month, Abrego Garcaa's wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura told The Washington Post that her husband's fears from childhood followed him for years, making him cry and sweat in his sleep. 'He never talked about them, but I could see it,' Vasquez Sura said. Following a March traffic stop, Abrego Garcia was detained by federal agents and deported to El Salvador's brutal Terrorism Confinement Center despite a court order preventing his removal from the country. He was later transferred to a Salvadoran prison for non-gang members. He had been working as a sheet-metal apprentice and living with his wife and their 5-year-old child, both U.S. citizens, along with two other children from a previous relationship. Last month, District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia's return to the United States. The Supreme Court unanimously affirmed Xinis's ruling and called his removal 'illegal.' Xinis has since clashed with government attorneys as they push to withhold details on what, if anything, has been done to return him. Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland traveled to El Salvador to meet Abrego Garcia as members of Congress demand the administration return him to U.S. soil, where government attorneys can present evidence against him to support his removal. Maryland Rep. Glenn Ivey is now traveling to El Salvador to try and meet with Abrego Garcia. 'The court orders for him to come back so that he can have his day in court,' Ivey told WBAL News Radio. 'We're not afraid of him having his day in court. That's what due process is all about. He needs to be brought back so he can have his day in court.' Republicans have opposed efforts to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States, citing allegations of criminality and a protective order filed by his wife in 2020, which she later rescinded. Ivey is expected to return from El Salvador on Tuesday.
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Wife of Kilmar Ábrego García speaks as White House defiant over US return
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported, expressed relief to learn he is alive after a Democratic US senator managed to meet with him in El Salvador – as the White House posted on social media that Ábrego García is 'never coming back' to the US. 'It was very overwhelming – the most important thing for me, my children, his mom, brothers was to see him alive, and we saw him alive,' Vasquez Sura told ABC in an interview. The Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen revealed on Thursday evening that he had met with Ábrego García at the maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as Cecot, where the autocratic regime holds prisoners without due process. On Friday, after returning to Washington, Van Hollen said Ábrego García told the senator that he had been moved from Cecot – where he was sharing a cell with 25 other prisoners – to a detention center with better conditions. Van Hollen said he traveled to El Salvador for more than just Ábrego García. 'It's about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States,' said Van Hollen, as Vasquez Sura stood nearby. Ábrego García in March was arrested by immigration agents in Maryland, where he had been living and working. Despite being undocumented, Ábrego García had been afforded a federal protection order against deportation to his native El Salvador, which the Trump administration ignored when it flew him and more than 200 Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador without warning or a court hearing, in a move that has fallen foul of judges in the US right up to the supreme court. Related: Denied, detained, deported: the people ensnared in Trump's immigration crackdown Van Hollen posted a picture of himself with Ábrego García in what appeared to be a cafeteria-style setting in the hospital wing of the prison. The previous day he had not been given access to the prison or his constituent after flying to El Salvador pledging to try to bring him back. Vasquez described her spouse as 'a very loving husband, an amazing father'. They were just parents 'trying to live the American dream,' she said. The Trump administration claims Ábrego García is a member of the Salvadorian violent gang network MS-13. But his family and the head of the sheet-metal workers' union that represents the trade in which he is an apprentice, have said he is not connected to a gang. He has not been charged with any crimes in the US or El Salvador. And the government admitted in a court filing that he had been deported in error, but it has since refused to work to secure his return to the US despite court orders to do so. The federal judge Paula Xinis has rebuked the Trump administration for resisting the court's instructions to have the father returned, saying that the government has not submitted any evidence to her court that Ábrego García is a gang member or criminal. The US president posted on social media criticizing the senator and the press in characteristic Trump language, saying Van Hollen 'looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone'. Hours later in the White House, Trump reeled off unsubstantiated allegations against Ábrego García as 'an MS-13 member, an illegal alien and a foreign terrorist, I assume'. He also read from a domestic violence protective order Vasquez filed against him in 2021 over allegations of domestic violence, describing him as violent and hitting and scratching her. Such a record is normally confidential unless the alleged victim chooses to release it, but the US president read excerpts to reporters. Having previously said it was from a bad period in their marriage that they worked through, with counseling, and forged a stronger partnership, Vasquez in the ABC interview declined to discuss the protective order further. 'I'm happy he's alive, and that's all I can say,' she said. Meanwhile, Vasquez said on Friday that Garcia had been picked up by federal agents as he was pulled over while driving in Maryland. 'What we thought was a regular traffic stop, turned out not to be a regular traffic stop,' she said, and reiterated denials that Garcia was a member of MS-13 or any other gang. 'He's not,' she added. Hours later on Friday, the White House made a sensational post on X, mocking the New York Times and Van Hollen and saying that Ábrego García is 'never coming back'. In a scathing court order, a US court of appeals for the fourth circuit on Thursday denied the administration's effort to appeal an earlier order from a federal judge in Maryland requiring the government to facilitate Ábrego García's return, and the judge issued a stark warning about US constitutional democracy, as Donald Trump continues to defy courts' orders on numerous fronts. The court said the administration's claim that it can't do anything to free the father from the prison and return him 'should be shocking' to the public. The blistering order further ratcheted up the escalating conflict between the US government's co-equal executive and judicial branches. The judge James Wilkinson said: '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.' 'Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done,' he added. The panel emphasized that Ábrego García is entitled to due process. 'If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order,' the panel said. Related: Kilmar Ábrego García's wife rejects Trump officials' depictions of him as 'violent' 'The judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions,' the judges said. Lawyers for immigrants in Texas on Friday told a judge that they believed the Trump administration was about to deport their clients under the Alien Enemies Act. An attorney for Trump's justice department said no deportation flights were planned – though the homeland security department said it reserved the right to remove people Saturday, CNN reported. Meanwhile, the federal judge Brian Murphy on Friday barred the Trump administration from implementing a new policy allowing it to rapidly deport hundreds if not thousands of immigrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show they fear being persecuted, tortured or killed there. Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
New York Times
08-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia's Tattoos. Here's a Closer Look.
President Trump has claimed that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, is a member of MS-13, the Salvadoran-American criminal gang, and that the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia's knuckles prove it. In a post nearly three weeks ago on Truth Social, Mr. Trump's social media platform, he gave his version of a primer on those tattoos, showing a photo of Mr. Abrego Garcia's hand, with one small tattoo on each finger: a marijuana leaf, a smiley face with X's for eyes, a cross and a skull. Above each of those black tattoos was a letter or a number — M, S, 1 and 3 — in a sans-serif font that clearly had been superimposed onto the photo. 'He's got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,' the president wrote in his post. In other photos, however, including ones shared by Mr. Abrego Garcia's wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the letters and numbers do not appear on Mr. Abrego Garcia's knuckles. Here's a close-up view of Mr. Abrego Garcia's tattoos from one of those photos: Each of the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia's knuckles is extremely common, but even combined, they are unremarkable, several tattoo experts said. And according to experts on gang membership, the tattoos that usually signify MS-13 membership are often much clearer in their association with the gang. Many times, they actually say MS-13, those experts said. 'I can tell you, MS-13 does not equivocate; they don't leave any ambiguity when it comes to their tattoos,' said Jorja Leap, an anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has been working with and studying MS-13 members for more than two decades. Mr. Abrego Garcia's tattoos leave room for interpretation, Ms. Leap said, which does not align with the bold way MS-13 operates. The gang, she said, is proud of the reputation that it is violent and lethal, and members often showcase their association through their tattoos. Sometimes, Ms. Leap said, the gang's full name, Mara Salvatrucha, is tattooed in large letters on the chests of its members, or featured across their backs and down their arms. It also is not uncommon for the gang's members to have MS-13 tattooed onto their cheeks and necks, she said, or to have tattoos of a devil-horns hand gesture — index and pinkie fingers up, everything else closed in a fist — because it's the gang's symbol. 'They are very clear, again, about their brand, and they espouse pride in it,' she said. José Miguel Cruz, an expert in transnational gangs who has interviewed more than 2,000 members of Central American gangs, including members of MS-13, said nothing about Mr. Abrego Garcia's tattoos signals MS-13 membership. Mr. Cruz has seen MS-13 members with many versions of elaborate tattoos: full-face ones of MS-13 and also ones like 666 or a beast that represents Satan. But he said he has never seen the combination of tattoos that are on Mr. Abrego Garcia's knuckles. 'The basic message here is that we cannot infer that he's MS-13 just because of those tattoos,' said Mr. Cruz, an associate professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida International University. Paul Bradley, the owner of Titan Ink, a tattoo shop in suburban Washington, where Mr. Abrego Garcia lived, has worked as a tattoo artist for 20 years. Referring to the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia's knuckles, he said he has tattooed each of those images on people countless times. 'I've pretty much done those tattoos on almost every spectrum of person: man, woman, young, old,' Mr. Bradley said. They are 'just symbols that people like for one reason or another.' Mr. Abrego Garcia's tattoos helped his wife, Ms. Vasquez Sura, to recognize him in photos posted online of men at a prison in El Salvador, where migrants were sent after being deported from the United States. Since Mr. Abrego Garcia's deportation, the Supreme Court has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his release. The president has dug in, calling him a dangerous gang member who should not be let back into the United States. Law enforcement officials say the tattoos on Mr. Abrego Garcia's hands do not qualify as singular and definitive evidence of membership in MS-13. While many police departments consider tattoos when trying to determine whether someone is a member of a gang, they also weigh other factors, including the use of hand signs or symbols linked to gangs and known association with gang members. David C. Pyrooz, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder and an expert on gangs and criminal networks, said even a blatant MS-13 tattoo on someone's neck or face would not guarantee active gang membership because that membership doesn't last forever and tattoos are hard to remove. It might have been a tattoo that they had inked 10-15 years ago, long before they dropped out of a gang to get a job or start a family, as many gang members do, he said.
