UPDATE: On Friday afternoon, federal judge Paula Xinis ruled that the Trump administration must return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States by the end of the day Monday, April 7, noting that allegations of gang affiliation need to come in “the form of an indictment, complaint, criminal processing … I haven’t yet heard any of that from the government.”
This sets up a possible showdown between the executive and legislative branches of government if the administration ignores the court and fails to bring Abrego Garcia home, triggering a constitutional crisis.
The ruling notes that, though Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador, “this court retains subject area jurisdiction” to order his return in order to “preserve the status quo and preserve Abrego Garcia’s access to due process in accordance with the constitution and governing immigration statutes.”
The AP reports that Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia’s wife and a U.S. citizen, urged supporters to keep fighting for “all the Kilmars out there whose stories are waiting to be heard.”
“To all you wives, mothers, and children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain,” she said, calling the situation “a nightmare that feels endless.”
Original story:
On March 12, 2025, Kilmar Abrego Garcia finished his shift as a sheet metal workers apprentice at a Baltimore jobsite, picked up his 5-year-old, special-needs son from his grandmother’s house, and began to drive home to Beltsville. “Shortly after he picked up our son, Kilmar called me, saying he was being pulled over,” his wife Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura wrote in court filings. “I told him to put me on speaker when he was talking with the police because he does not feel confident speaking English.”
According to Vasquez Sura, who is a U.S. citizen, Abrego Garcia thought it was a routine traffic stop and pulled over into the College Park Ikea parking lot. “The person at his window told him to turn off the car and get out. In English, Kilmar told the officer that his son was in the backseat of the car and had special needs,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “At that point, I heard the officer take Kilmar’s phone and hang up.”
A few minutes later, someone from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called Vasquez Sura and told her she had ten minutes to pick up their son before they brought Child Protection Services into it. She arrived a few minutes later to see her husband sitting on the curb in handcuffs. “They had taken his work boots and his belt off. There were two male officers and a female officer with my child,” Vasquez Sura wrote. The agents told her his “immigration status had changed” and they were taking him into detention and offered her a chance to say goodbye.
“Kilmar was crying and I told him he would come back home because he hadn’t done anything wrong,” she recalled. After all, they had been through this before, and Abrego Garcia had a status that made it illegal to deport him to El Salvador.
***
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1995. His mother ran a pupusa business called Pupusa Cecilia from their home in the Los Nogales neighborhood and everyone in the family had some role in the business. Kilmar both bought the ingredients for the pupusas and did deliveries. Eventually, according to court documents, the gang Barrio 18 began to demand “rent” for doing business in the neighborhood. His mother Cecilia paid the extortion, but eventually the gang said they wanted Cesar, Kilmar’s older brother, to join the gang. The family sent Cesar to the U.S. and the gang then tried to recruit Kilmar when he was only 12. According to court filings, Kilmar’s father saved him from the gang at that time by paying them a large amount, but they would not leave Kilmar alone. The Abrego family moved to another neighborhood, but the gang followed them. Kilmar had to spend most of his time inside, hiding. After further death threats, the family moved again. But after four months of more threats and fear, the Abregos sent Kilmar to the U.S. in 2011.
Five years later, in 2016, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, who already had two children, and who, like the children, is a U.S. citizen. In late 2018, when she was pregnant, Abrego Garcia moved in and began to support the growing family through construction work. In March 2019, he went to the Home Depot in Hyattsville, looking for work as a day laborer. While waiting around for a job, Abrego Garcia and three other men were stopped by police, according to court documents. “At the police station, the four young men were placed into different rooms and questioned. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was asked if he was a gang member; when he told police he was not, they said that they did not believe him and repeatedly demanded that he provide information about other gang members. The police told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that he would be released if he cooperated, but he repeatedly explained that he did not have any information to give because he did not know anything,” a 2019 court filing reads.
“At the end of my work shift, I texted him asking him to pick me up. I remember seeing that the message was marked as ‘read,’ but Kilmar did not respond, which was not like him,” Vasquez Sura recalled in an affidavit. “I called him, but he did not answer. Shortly after, his phone was turned off.”
Abrego Garcia was held in custody and ICE ultimately declared that he was a gang member based on the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie. They later claimed that a confidential informant told them that he was “an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” even though the Western clique is located in Long Island. Vasquez Sura was in the third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and, not knowing if he would be deported, she and Abrego Garcia were married in the Howard County Detention Center in June 2019 in a ceremony that was “far from how we ever imagined it.”
“I coordinated with the detention center and a local pastor to officiate our wedding,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “We were separated by glass and were not allowed physical contact. The officer had to pass our rings to each other. It was heartbreaking not to be able to hug him.”
“We were separated by glass and were not allowed physical contact. The officer had to pass our rings to each other. It was heartbreaking not to be able to hug him.”
Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Abrego Garcia had a hearing on August 9. During the hearing, “I began having contractions. Our son…was born two days later on August 11, 2019,” Vasquez Sura wrote. Abrego Garcia was not able to be there or to meet his son. Finally, in October 2019, after months of incarceration, a judge granted Abrego Garcia “withholding of removal” status, which made it illegal for him to be deported to El Salvador because of “past persecution based on protected ground, and the presumption of a well-founded fear of future persecution,” which means that the government could not deport him to El Salvador because to do so would cause irreparable harm based upon past threats. The government denied his request for formal asylum and rejected his claims under the Convention Against Torture, but still, Abrego Garcia was free.
“That day, Kilmar’s attorney called and told me the news: Kilmar won his case. She explained that the judge granted him a special status that allows him to stay in the U.S. and makes it illegal to deport him to El Salvador,” Vasquez Sura recalled. “She told me that he cannot leave the country or he would lose his status.”
Abrego Garcia began to work in a five-year metal worker apprentice program, where he was a member of the Smart Local 100 union and enrolled at the University of Maryland, while helping care for the family’s three children, including their new son, who was diagnosed with autism and is nonverbal.
“Kilmar continued to be the supportive, loving, reliable, and law-abiding man I know and love. He was never arrested or accused of a crime. And to my knowledge, he never again was stopped by the police officers that accused him of being a gang member in 2019,” Vasquez Sura wrote. It’s why she believed things would be cleared up following his March 2025 detention.
But that is not what happened.
***
“At approximately 9:00 PM the night he was arrested, Kilmar called me from Baltimore,” Vasquez Sura recalled. “He told me that he was questioned about a past traffic stop and that out of nowhere, they were bringing up the old, false accusations of MS-13 gang membership that we thought were behind us. He said that when they interrogated him about his connections to MS-13 that they asked him about his visits to Don Ramon, a restaurant we frequented as a family, and asked him about a photo they had of him playing basketball with others at a local public court. Kilmar did not understand what was happening or why. He was reassured he would see a judge.”
But, like hundreds of others recently detained by ICE and deported without due process, he did not see a judge, and after one more call, was transferred to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. On the morning of March 15, Abrego Garcia called his wife one more time. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different. He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador…to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT,’” Vasquez Sura wrote. “After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.”
“He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador…to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT,’” Vasquez Sura wrote. “After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.”
The next day, her brother-in-law sent her a photo of the alleged gang members who had been deported to the CECOT prison. “It was a group of men bent over on the ground, with their heads down and their arms on their heads,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “None of their faces were visible. There was one man who had two scars on his head like Kilmar does, and tattoos that looked similar to Kilmar’s. I zoomed into get a closer look at the tattoos. My heart sank. It was Kilmar.”
***
Abrego Garcia’s life-and-death case has prompted a furious response from his attorneys and advocacy groups like CASA, unions such as SMART, and Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore.
“We can be pro-public safety and pro-Constitution at the same time,” Moore said in a statement. “No one should be deported to the very country where a judge determined they will face persecution. It’s outrageous that due process means nothing to the federal administration. They’ve admitted to making an error and I urge them to correct it.”
These complaints have been met with the equivalent of a dismissive shrug by Homeland Security, whose director Kristi Noem staged a photoshoot with an obscenely expensive watch in front of the shirtless prisoners at CECOT, calling his illegal deportation an “oversight” and an “administrative error,” while simultaneously claiming that because Abrego Garcia is not in the U.S., courts cannot order to have him returned to the U.S. and that the “irreparable harm” he faces in El Salvador is OK because it might not technically be torture.
“ICE needs to return him safely to the United States,” CASA wrote in a statement. “They are paying for his imprisonment in El Salvador and are maximizing their close ties to Salvadoran leadership to expel many men – without due process – to El Salvador. ICE needs to bring Kilmar home to Maryland, immediately.”
“Plaintiff has requested that this Court order Defendants to request his return from the government of El Salvador: first, just ask them nicely to please give him back to us,” Abrego Garcia’s attorney argues. “It is inexplicable that Defendants have not done so already. Meanwhile, Plaintiff also asks this Court to order Defendants not to mix their messages by continuing to pay the government of El Salvador further compensation to hold on to him.”
Attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg’s April 2 filing concludes with a fierce rebuke of the government in this case. “In the end, the public interest is best served by restoring the supremacy of laws over power,” he writes. “The Department of Homeland Security must obey the orders of the immigration courts, or else such courts become meaningless. Noncitizens — and their U.S.-citizen spouses and children — must know that if this nation awards them a grant protection from persecution, it will honor that commitment even when the political winds shift.”
“Noncitizens — and their U.S.-citizen spouses and children — must know that if this nation awards them a grant protection from persecution, it will honor that commitment even when the political winds shift.”
Attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg in an April 2 filing
According to a recent report by the Comptroller’s office, Maryland had 436,000 ”unnaturalized residents,” or immigrants who have not become citizens, in 2021 — the most recent data provided. And that number was expected to grow. “I have no higher priority than the safety of Marylanders,” Governor Moore said in his statement.
A federal judge will hear further arguments on the issue in federal court in Greenbelt on Friday afternoon, rousing hope that Abrego Garcia may be reunited with his family again. Vasquez Sura notes that the separation has been especially difficult on their special needs son. “Although he cannot speak, he shows me how much he missed Kilmar. He has been finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent.”
This story will be updated.