HYATTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to arrange for the return of a Maryland man to the United States after he was mistakenly deported to a notorious El Salvador prison.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled Kilmar Abrego Garcia last month despite an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling that shielded him from deportation to his native El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs.
The judge’s ruling came shortly after Abrego Garcia’s wife joined dozens of supporters at a rally to urge her husband’s immmediate return.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, hasn’t spoken to Abrego Garcia since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She urged her supporters to keep fighting for her husband “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard.”
“To all the wives, mothers, children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain,” she said during the rally at a community center in Hyattsville, Maryland. “It’s a journey that no one ever should ever have to suffer, a nightmare that feels endless.”
The campaign to reunite the couple will shift to a courtroom in Greenbelt, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C.
The White House has cast Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, as an MS-13 gang member and assert that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because the Salvadoran national is no longer in the U.S.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have countered that there is no evidence he was in MS-13. The allegation is based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.
Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation, described by the White House as an “administrative error,” has outraged many and raised concerns about expelling noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the U.S.
Abrego Garcia had a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to legally work in the U.S., his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said. He served as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license.
He fled El Salvador around 2011 because he and his family were facing threats by local gangs. In 2019, a U.S. immigration judge granted him protection from deportation to El Salvador because he was likely to face gang persecution. He was released and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did not appeal the decision or try to deport him to another country.
Abrego Garcia later married Vasquez Sura. The couple are parents to their son and her two children from a previous relationship.
“If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it all just to buy one thing: a phone call to hear Kilmar’s voice again,” Vasquez Sura said. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, I miss you so much, and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children.”
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