Kilmar Armando Ábrego García

Kilmar Armando Ábrego García’s story involves the U.S. government’s extraordinary pursuit of a rather ordinary man—a Salvadoran immigrant who had lived quietly in Maryland, working and raising his family far from the politics that would later engulf him. His wrongful deportation from the United States in 2025 drew international attention to U.S. immigration enforcement and human rights. Ábrego García had entered the United States without authorization about 2011 but, because of the danger he faced in his home country of El Salvador, received protection under U.S. federal law that prevented his removal.

At the time of his 2025 detention, he was living in Maryland with his wife, their five-year-old child, and two children from a previous relationship. According to court documents, immigration agents stopped Ábrego García on March 12, 2025, and incorrectly informed him that his legal status had changed. Three days later, despite the standing order protecting him from removal, Ábrego García was deported to El Salvador and confined in the country’s maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a facility widely criticized for its harsh conditions. From there, he was ultimately returned to the United States—despite government claims that such a return was impossible—yet his future remains uncertain, as U.S. officials continue to hold him in custody while pursuing his removal to another country.

Read about other ordinary people who changed history

Background

Kilmar Armando Ábrego García was born in July 1995 in Los Nogales, a small working-class neighborhood on the edge of San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. Ábrego García’s parents, Cecilia García de Ábrego and Armando Ábrego, worked hard to support their family. His mother sold traditional Salvadoran food from their home, and his father worked as a police officer before becoming a taxi driver. The children often helped with errands and deliveries for their mother’s small business. Friends and former neighbors remembered Ábrego García as an easygoing child who spent his days playing soccer, riding bikes, and joking around with other children in the neighborhood. Beneath that sense of normalcy, though, daily life in El Salvador was increasingly shaped by gang violence that would later affect Ábrego García and his family. Rival groups such as MS-13 and Barrio 18 competed for territorial control and targeted young boys for recruitment into the gangs, sometimes through intimidation in schools and neighborhoods.

The tension reached Ábrego García’s family when members of Barrio 18 began extorting them and pressuring Ábrego García’s elder brother, César, to join the gang. As threats escalated, César fled El Salvador, eventually settling in the United States, where he later became a citizen. Even after the family moved to a different neighborhood, harassment from the gang continued. Fearing for Ábrego García’s safety, his parents decided he should leave as well. In 2011, at age 16, Ábrego García left El Salvador and made his way to the United States without authorization, eventually settling in Prince George’s county, Maryland, near Washington, D.C., where he would begin his new life.

In 2016 Ábrego García met Jennifer Stefania Vásquez Sura in Maryland. She had two children from a previous relationship, and the couple eventually began living together. In March 2019, while Vásquez Sura was pregnant with their child, Ábrego García was detained by local police outside of a Home Depot where he sought work as a day laborer. Authorities suspected him and three other men of affiliation with MS-13 based on tattoos, clothing, and a confidential informant’s statement. Ábrego García’s attorneys said he had no affiliation with MS-13 and had no criminal history. No charges were filed, and Prince George’s County Police later confirmed that they had no further evidence linking him to the gang. Regardless, Ábrego García was transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and remained in detention while his immigration case was considered.

During his detention he petitioned for asylum and asked to be released in light of his partner’s high-risk pregnancy. The couple married in a Maryland detention center in June 2019, and in August Vásquez Sura gave birth to their child. In October 2019 an immigration judge denied Ábrego García’s asylum application but granted him protection from being deported to El Salvador (called withholding of removal), recognizing the danger he would face there. He was released, and ICE did not appeal, making the protection final. Ábrego García received a work permit, joined a union, and was employed as a sheet-metal apprentice. He continued to live with Vásquez Sura and their three children—all of whom are disabled—while checking in regularly with immigration authorities.

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In 2021 Vásquez Sura filed a temporary protective order against Ábrego García, accusing him of punching and scratching her. The protective order was dropped a month later, however, after Vásquez Sura did not appear at a court hearing required to make it permanent. She later stated that the couple had addressed the matter privately, including through counseling. The episode resurfaced in 2025 when U.S. officials cited the temporary order during debates over his deportation in an attempt to characterize Ábrego García as violent.

Deportation and legal proceedings

In early 2025 Ábrego García was living a settled life in Maryland, working steadily and checking in with immigration authorities as required by his immigration status. That stability unraveled on March 12, 2025.

After picking up his five-year-old son near their home, Ábrego García was pulled over by ICE officers. Uneasy speaking English, he had his wife translate via his phone. She later recounted that the call was abruptly cut off by an officer who grabbed the phone and hung up after Ábrego García mentioned that their son was in the back seat of the car. Minutes later, someone identifying themself as a Department of Homeland Security official called Vásquez Sura back, warning her that she had 10 minutes to retrieve their child or ICE would contact child protective services.

Ábrego García was arrested and taken into ICE custody. According to court records, he phoned his wife from jail, telling her that authorities were questioning him about alleged ties to MS-13. Vásquez Sura said in court documents, “He would repeat the truth again and again—that he was not in a gang.” Over the next two days, he called her from immigration detention facilities in Baltimore, then Louisiana, and later Texas. On March 15, three days after he was pulled over, he made a final call to his wife. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different,” she wrote in an affidavit. “He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT.’ He asked me to contact his mom with all his U.S. immigration paperwork so they can give that to a lawyer in El Salvador. After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.”

The day of that phone call, Ábrego García was placed on a U.S. government charter flight to El Salvador, part of a broader operation the administration of Pres. Donald Trump used to expel Venezuelan and Salvadoran nationals. He was then taken to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum-security prison widely criticized for its harsh and often abusive conditions. The Salvadoran government has described those held at CECOT as “terrorists” and declared that they “will never leave.” Court filings later showed that U.S. immigration officials were aware of Ábrego García’s legal protection against removal to El Salvador but nevertheless included him on the flight; government lawyers later described the deportation as an administrative error.

The wrongful deportation prompted immediate litigation in federal court, where U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland called the removal “wholly lawless” and ordered Ábrego García’s return. The dispute reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which on April 10 partly granted and partly denied an emergency application, leaving in place the directive that the government take steps to facilitate Ábrego García’s return while remanding to the lower court for clarification.

The administration claimed that retrieving Ábrego García from El Salvador was not possible because of diplomatic and logistical hurdles. The controversy escalated when Salvadoran Pres. Nayib Bukele visited the White House on April 14, and reporters asked both presidents about returning Ábrego García to the United States. Bukele dismissed the question, falsely calling Ábrego García a terrorist and saying, “How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States, or what do I do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”

U.S. politicians and members of the public expressed outrage over Ábrego García’s deportation. A few days after Bukele’s White House visit, U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat of Maryland, traveled to El Salvador to demand access to Ábrego García. At first Salvadoran Vice Pres. Félix Ulloa denied Van Hollen’s requests to visit or even speak with Ábrego García by phone. After several appeals, however, the government let the senator meet with Ábrego García. Bukele later posted photos of the encounter on social media, accompanied by the caption: “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.”

After several weeks of negotiations Ábrego García was flown back to the United States in June but was kept in federal custody in Nashville. That same day federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment, filed two weeks earlier, accusing him of human smuggling, alleging that he had transported migrants without legal status for profit. Among the evidence was a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, in which he had been pulled over with eight passengers in his vehicle but was not ticketed or charged. Ábrego García’s attorneys dismissed the indictment as politically motivated and unrelated to his separate wrongful deportation lawsuit. Immigration courts, which operate under the Department of Justice rather than Immigration and Customs Enforcement, meanwhile kept his deportation on hold while both the criminal case and the civil lawsuit proceeded. The decision to pursue the indictment reportedly led a senior federal prosecutor to resign over concerns that the case was being driven by political considerations.

In late August 2025 Ábrego García was released from criminal custody and returned to Maryland, but three days later, after a routine check-in at the ICE office in Baltimore, he was taken back into ICE custody. He was then held at a detention facility in Virginia while awaiting trial on the federal smuggling charges, but in October 2025 was transferred to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, where he remained in custody. However, on December 11, 2025, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland ordered ICE to release Ábrego García immediately, stating that federal authorities had taken him back into custody upon his return to the United States without any lawful basis. The Department of Homeland Security sharply objected to the decision, characterizing it as “naked judicial activism” and noting that Xinis had been appointed during the Obama administration. According to his attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Ábrego García is likely to face additional legal challenges, and preparations are being made to oppose any renewed efforts to deport him. His attorney stated: “I wish I could say that this is the end of the story, but I think we’ve all been here long enough to know that unfortunately the government is not going to leave [Ábrego García] alone. They’re going to keep throwing the weight of the Department of Justice, the weight of the Department of Homeland Security, against this man and against his family.”

Ábrego García returned to his home in Maryland on December 11. He remains involved in several legal disputes. For instance, his existing federal lawsuit—alleging that the Trump administration used deportation proceedings to retaliate against him for the attention his case has attracted—remains pending. He has also pleaded not guilty to the human smuggling charge stemming from the 2022 traffic stop and is seeking dismissal of that case, arguing that the prosecution is vindictive. At the same time, Ábrego García is attempting to reopen his immigration proceedings so that he can apply for asylum in the United States. Together, these proceedings leave his legal future uncertain.

Attempts to Deport Ábrego García to Third Countries

Throughout his legal battles the U.S. government pressed to remove Ábrego García from the country, looking to third nations that might accept him. Immigration authorities explored removing Ábrego García to several potential countries, such as Uganda and Eswatini, though neither of these countries had formally agreed to receive him. In late October 2025 the Department of Homeland Security informed a Maryland federal court that Liberia had agreed to accept him. In response, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to halt any deportation efforts while an injunction remains in place and required that Ábrego García be allowed to pursue protection claims before any transfer occurs. Ábrego García’s attorneys have also said that the Trump administration offered to remove him to Costa Rica if he agreed to plead guilty to the human smuggling charges.

Reactions and significance

Ábrego García’s case became a symbol of the second Trump administration’s immigration policies. Legal experts cited the case as an example of federal officials’ constitutional overreach in denying Ábrego García due process, or the right to contest an arrest by the government. Kim Wehle, a constitutional law professor and former federal prosecutor, told NPR that the episode raised fundamental questions about the government’s respect for constitutional protections. “Everyone in the U.S., including those without legal status, have constitutional rights to due process under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments,” Wehle said. “It dates back to the Magna Carta in England in 1215. And the idea is that you get notice of an offense and an opportunity to be heard before the government can take your liberty away.”

The case also exposed a broader constitutional test: whether the executive branch would obey the courts. Despite rulings from both a federal judge and the Supreme Court ordering Ábrego García’s return from El Salvador, administration officials delayed action for weeks, insisting that they lacked authority to carry it out. In a court filing, Ábrego García’s attorneys wrote that “the executive branch’s wanton disregard for the judicial branch has left a stain on the Constitution.” The episode highlighted tensions between the executive and judicial branches over the limits of their respective powers.

Supporters of stricter enforcement argue that the controversy illustrates the difficulty of balancing humanitarian protections with concerns about public safety and border control, pointing to the government’s human smuggling allegations. Yet across the political spectrum, legal analysts maintain that the litigation surrounding Ábrego García underscores a central principle: Individuals—regardless of immigration status—are entitled to the protections of law before they can be removed or confined.