Dangerous criminal, father and dedicated husband, violent husband, adolescent threatened by gangs, gang member, undocumented migrant, honest worker … Defining who Kilmar Armando Abrego García is is the pulse that maintains their defenders and the Government of Donald Trump. The latter, determined to endorse crimes despite not having any formal accusation, and his family, to deny them. Angel or demon, the truth is that, involuntarily, Abrego García has erected in the greatest symbol of controversy around the legality of Trump’s deportations. And in its greatest requirement, after the administration recognized that its expulsion to El Salvador was “an error”, a statement that now tries to contradict.
The Salvadoran, 29, was deported on March 15 to the Central American country with 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans accused of belonging to the train gangs of Aragua and MS-13. The three planes on which they were transferred landed in El Salvador despite the fact that a judge had ordered his return. It was useless for the protection that a judge granted him in 2019, which prohibited deportation for the fear of reprisaling, even death, if he returned to his country. A country that saw him grow up to 16, when he undertook a trip that was believed without return to American dream.
Kilmar was born in 1995 and his childhood and adolescence passed in Los Nogales, a working neighborhood of San Salvador. His father, Armando Abrego, was a policeman and was driving a taxi and his mother, Cecilia García de Abrego, had a homemade tortillas and pupusa in the garage of his house. Kilmar and his brothers collaborated with the family business buying the provisions and distributing the orders. Childhood friends interviewed by several media outline as a common child, who liked to play football, ride a bicycle and make water balloons with their friends. One of them declared The New York Times that “he liked to make jokes and cause problems.”
At that time the Savior lived an internal war between the gangs, who struggled to incorporate territories. Violence became routine at the hands of the MS-13 (as the Mara Salvatrucha is known) and Barrio 18, which were looking for new recruits in schools. Barrio 18, attracted to the business, extorted his family and pressed for Kilmar to join the group. The eldest son, César, fled to Mexico and continued to the United States, where years later he got nationality.
The family moved from neighborhood, but the gang members found them and continued the pressure. “They will appear in black bags,” said his mother who told them. Kilmar’s parents feared for their son’s life and agreed that, with 16 years, he followed his brother’s path. In 2011, he escaped the threats of the mara and illegally crossed the border with the United States. He reached Maryland and was located in Prince George County, where he would remain the next 12 years.
It was there that he met what his wife would be, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, who had left a toxic relationship and had two young children, a girl with epilepsy and a child who was autistic. She remembers that there was chemistry on the first event, which they celebrated inside a car for lunch. Vásquez Sura caused a good impression that would take some lollipops for his children. Shortly after they began to live together and Kilmar assumed the role of the children’s father.
When they were waiting for a son, in 2019, the first mishap occurred with justice. I expected outside an Home Depot store, in Hyattsville, Maryland, where he went to get work as a day laborer, when he was arrested along with three other men, whom he did not know. Two of them were identified as members of the MS-13 and Kilmar accused him of the same. An American Bulls Chicago football team cap and its hooded sweatshirt were the tests that the agents contributed. An anonymous source confirmed its belonging to the gang, but could never be checked. Abrego García has always denied being part of the MS-13.
In spite of this, he was transferred to the Immigration and Customs Control Service (ICE) and kept him seven months in a detention center, where a deportation process would be opened. It was there where, separated by a screen, he married Vásquez Sura, who carried a high risk pregnancy. Nor could he receive his first child, who was born with a malformation of the ear and was later diagnosed with autism.
The migratory process closed with the ruling of a judge who granted him a special protection status, which prohibited his deportation to El Salvador for understanding that his life would be in danger if he did. A status that the Trump government ignored when he sent him to the Central American country.
The confinement was traumatic for Abrego García and began to have violent behaviors with his wife, who came to request a judicial protection order twice. Vásquez Sura declared before the judge that he verbally and physically assaulted her and that she broke things at home, which frightened the children. However, he did not follow up on the order, and when he did not appear he was without effect.
From the government this episode of his life has been used to criminalize it: “The facts are clear: Kilmar Abrego García is a violent immigrant who abuses women and children. He had no right to be in our country and we are proud to have deported this violent thug,” said Undersecretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement.
Vásquez Sura, who from her deportation struggles tirelessly for the return of her husband, has justified in numerous statements that her husband suffered depression after the arrest and that the therapy served for the couple to move forward with their family life. “No one is perfect and no marriage is perfect,” he said. “Kilmar is a affectionate partner and father, and I will continue supporting him, fighting for justice and demanding his return to the family who loves him.”
His struggle already exceeds 50 days, the time he has not been news of him, as he recalled May 1 in a protest before the White House. It was March 12 a fateful day that changed their lives. Abrego García had just pick up his five -year -old son, when he was intercepted by ICE agents. He barely had time to call his wife to tell him that they were stopping him, although he did not understand why. The agents gave Vásquez Sura ten minutes to go to pick up his son. And that was the last time she saw her husband.
Three days later, in a brief call, he told him scared that he believed they deported him to El Salvador. She could confirm it to see a published photo of detainees imprisoned in the prison of CECOT, the prison designed by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, to enclose the gang members, known for the inhuman conditions in which the prisoners are maintained. He recognized him for his scars and tattoos. Some drawings under the skin that the authorities have become the irrefutable proof that belongs to MS-13. Trump himself published a photo in which he showed Abrego García’s fist with the tattoos of his knuckles: a marijuana blade, a smiling face with X as eyes, a cross and a skull. Tattoos that are considered common by experts and cannot prove their belonging to gangs.
Maryland’s district judge, Paula Xinis, who has taken the case, has rejected the evidence provided by the government that links him to MS-13. The magistrate maintains a pulse with the Executive after the deportation of Abrego García and demanded the Government in the early April and demanded that the Government take it back to the US. The judicial process has reached the Supreme Court that, unanimously, said that the Government must “facilitate” the return of the Salvadoran. Not even the High Court ruling has made the Trump administration resolved not to correct its error, manage its return. The case has not been closed and the government’s last strategy has been to declare that its efforts are “State Secret”, to avoid complying with the court order to give information about their movements to free it.
On the contrary, in its efforts to criminalize it, it has contributed new evidence: a video of a traffic control in which it was driving a vehicle in which it transferred nine migrants and that the authorities find suspect of traffic of people. There were no charges against him and was released with a fine for driving with an expired permit.
Abrego García, on whom no accusation weighs, continues imprisoned in El Salvador, in another prison that is not Cecot, from which he was transferred. His belonging or not to a criminal gang is the object of discussion in political and social circles and his case has become a symbol of injustices committed to achieve the greatest deportation in the history of the United States.
“Maybe, but maybe not,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative magistrate of a Federal Court of Appeals in Virginia wrote, wondering if Abrego García was a gang. “Anyway, you still have the right to due process,” he said.
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