Kilmar Abrego Garcia was living in Maryland with his wife and three children when he was deported to El Salvador, thrusting his case into the center of a pivotal legal battle. The Trump administration has accused him of being a member of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang and used that in its justification for deporting him to his home country — despite a judge’s order from 2019 barring him from being sent there.
The father of three who had lived in Maryland for 13 years is now being held in a notorious mega-prison. The administration has called his incarceration there an “administrative error.” His wife and attorney deny the accusations against him and have been fighting for his return. They say he is a loving father and husband. He has never been charged with or convicted of a crime in the United States, records show.
The legal fight over his return is ongoing. A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release, an order affirmed by the Supreme Court, and to provide evidence of the actions it has taken to get him back. The administration has since doubled down on its accusations that Abrego Garcia was a gang member and has said that because he is now in El Salvador, it does not have the authority to bring him back.
After weeks of outcry and no trace of Abrego Garcia, he was temporarily released from prison on April 17 to meet with Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland.
Abrego Garcia was shown in a photo wearing a button down short-sleeved shirt and cap, sitting at a table with the senator. It is unclear what the two discussed, but Van Hollen said he called Abrego Garcia’s wife “to pass along his message of love.”
“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted,” Van Hollen said. “He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes.”
Van Hollen told reporters that Abrego Garcia has “experienced trauma,” and framed his deportation as an “illegal abduction.”
After the meeting, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said that the man will remain in prison, “now that he’s been confirmed healthy.”
Bukele, who has championed his country’s use of mass incarceration, said in a meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House that he would not release Abrego Garcia.
As the high-stakes case continues to play out in court, here’s what we know about Abrego Garcia and the case.
From El Salvador to Maryland
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in July 1995, in the neighborhood of Los Nogales in El Salvador, according to court filings, where he helped his family run a business making pupusas, a local cuisine. He has said that he and his family received death threats and were extorted by the local gang Barrio 18.
He crossed the border illegally near McAllen, Texas, in March 2012 when he was 16 years old, according to documents posted on X by Attorney General Pam Bondi. From the border, Abrego Garcia made his way to Maryland to live with his brother, who is a U.S. citizen.
In 2016, he met his wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who is also a U.S. citizen. They had a young son together, and Vasquez Sura has two children from a previous marriage. Abrego Garcia was a sheet metal apprentice and a member of the local union.
A 2019 arrest and gang allegations
Abrego Garcia was arrested in March 2019 in a Home Depot parking lot in Hyattsville with three other men for “loitering.” His attorneys said he was there looking for day labor work. Police assessed that he was a gang member at the time, according to arrest documents.He had no criminal record at the time, which the documents also state.
One of the men arrested that day was known to the Prince George’s County Police Department as an MS-13 gang member, according to a document titled “gang field interview sheet.”
Police interviewed the men, including Abrego Garcia. The document said he was wearing “a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents” on the bills. The officers said such clothing was “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.”
The officers also said they consulted with a “past proven and reliable confidential source,” who “advised” that Abrego Garcia was an active gang member who had the moniker “Chele.”
His attorneys noted Abrego Garcia was not charged and said in court documents that “there is no reliable evidence in the record to support” that he is a member of MS-13, adding that that the allegation “is based on hearsay relayed by a confidential source” and the clothing he was wearing.
The Prince George’s County Police Department said that multiple members of its gang unit interviewed the four men after their arrest.
Its detectives “had reasonable suspicion, based upon their training and experience” to say that three of the men, including Abrego Garcia, “displayed traits associated with MS-13 gang culture,” the department said.
“This was based on tattoos, clothing, as well as information from a source,” police said.
Police did not arrest any of the men, said they have not interacted with Abrego Garcia again and have not received any new intelligence related to him.
One of the detectives who interviewed the men was former officer Ivan Mendez, who was suspended in April 2019 as part of an unrelated matter, police said. Mendez pleaded guilty to “Misconduct in Office” in that unrelated incident.
As a result, the department proposed that Mendez’s employment be terminated, which he accepted, a statement from police said. Mendez was terminated from the department in December 2022.
Police identified two men, one of whom was Abrego Garcia, as having been previously detained in a murder investigation, according to a Department of Homeland Security document from 2019. Abrego Garcia denied being connected to a murder investigation, the documents say, and he was never charged.
The release of documents on April 16 was the fullest detailing of the circumstance around his arrest and came after weeks of pressure on administration officials to prove its contention that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang.
The Department of Homeland Security also posted on social media that Abrego Garcia’s wife had received a temporary protective order against him in 2021. Vasquez Sura did not appear for the hearing and the case was ultimately dismissed. She released a statement explaining what happened.
“After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution after a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order in case things escalated,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement Wednesday. “Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process.”
“No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect. That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added.
The administration has also accused Abrego Garcia of being involved in “human trafficking,” but did not release evidence of the claim until April 18 when the Department of Homeland Security released a report detailing a traffic stop in Tennessee in 2022 where an officer suspected Abrego Garcia human trafficking while driving a vehicle with eight other people.
Abrego Garcia said the men were traveling for construction work, according to the report. Because there was no luggage in the vehicle, the officer on the scene suspected it could be human trafficking, it said.
The Tennessee Highway Patrol said in a statement that in 2022 Abrego Garcia was stopped for speeding on the I-40. The agency contacted federal law enforcement, who decided not to detain him, the statement said.
When the Highway Patrol ran his license, they discovered it was expired and there was a note to call federal authorities because of his alleged affiliation with MS-13 following the incident in 2019, a senior Tennessee law enforcement official said.
When the agency called ICE, it declined to pick him up and take him into custody, the official said. He was released without charges.
The interaction between Abrego Garcia and the agency was “cordial,” the official said, adding that Abrego Garcia said the other men in the car were traveling between construction jobs.
“Kilmar worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, so it’s entirely plausible he would have been pulled over while driving with others in the vehicle,” his wife said in a statement. “He was not charged with any crime or cited for any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, Kilmar is currently imprisoned without contact with the outside world, which means he cannot respond to the claims or defend himself.”
What was his immigration status?
After his 2019 arrest, Abrego Garcia was handed over to immigration authorities and placed in deportation proceedings.
Vasquez Sura said she and her husband testified in his defense against the allegations that he was a gang member and sought his release, according to court documents. She described the process as “emotional and unfair.”
Despite their testimony, a judge denied Abrego Garcia bond after his arrest outside the Home Depot, documents released by the Justice Department show.
“Although the Court is reluctant to give evidentiary weight to the Respondent’s clothing as an indication of gang affiliation, the fact that a ‘past, proven, and reliable source of information’ verified the Respondent’s gang membership, rank, and gang name is sufficient to support that the Respondent is a gang member, and the Respondent has failed to present evidence to rebut that assertion,” Immigration Judge Elizabeth Kessler wrote in 2019. Her decision was upheld by another judge in an appeals hearing.
Kessler also noted there was a seeming discrepancy regarding why the government arrested him. One form stated it was in relation to a murder investigation, she wrote, while another states police approached him “because he and others were loitering outside of Home Depot.” Abrego Garcia responded that “there is no reliable evidence in the record to support” that he is a member of MS-13 and that the allegation “is based on hearsay relayed by a confidential source.”
Abrego Garcia then filed for asylum and withholding of removal, a temporary form of legal protection, so that he would not be deported to El Salvador. Before his 2019 hearing, authorities told the court that their evidence of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership was limited to the “gang field interview sheet” from the Home Depot arrest, and they had nothing further to add.
An immigration judge barred Abrego Garcia from being sent to El Salvador, saying he proved he had a “well-founded fear of future persecution” from local gangs. The court granted withholding of removal as long as he checked in with authorities annually, something he attested to doing in court filings. This gave him legal status in the United States temporarily and allowed him to receive a work permit.
ICE did not appeal, and Abrego Garcia was released. He returned to his family, where he resumed working and began a five-year apprenticeship program to become a licensed journeyman, his wife wrote in an affidavit.
“We really believed that the false accusations had been cleared up and that they were behind us,” she wrote.
Deportation to El Salvador
On March 12, Abrego Garcia was pulled over while he was with his child by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on his way home from a work site in Baltimore. He was on the phone with his wife and told her he had pulled into the parking lot of an Ikea when an officer “put his lights on.” Abrego Garcia then pulled into the parking lot of an Ikea.
“I told him to put me on speaker when he was talking with the police because he does not feel confident speaking English,” Jennifer wrote in a declaration provided to the court
When an officer got to the window of Abrego Garcia’s car, according to Vasquez Sura, they told him to roll down the windows and step out of the vehicle. Abrego Garcia told the officer his son was in the backseat and had special needs. In a sworn declaration, she says officers then hung up the call, and minutes later called back, identifying as someone with the Department of Homeland Security, and told her she needed to get there in 10 minutes to pick up her son or they would “call child protective services.”
When she arrived, she said Abrego Garcia was on the curb in handcuffs, and officers on the scene claimed his “immigration status had changed,” Vasquez Sura wrote.
“They asked me if I wanted to say goodbye to Kilmar,” Jennifer wrote. “Kilmar was crying and I told him he would come back home because he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
He was arrested by immigration authorities, and was transferred to facilities in Maryland, Louisiana and Texas, the declaration said. During that time, Abrego Garcia spoke on the phone with his wife five times. On March 15, he was sent to El Salvador.
“I never heard from Kilmar again,” Vasquez Sura wrote.
On March 16, the Salvadoran president posted a video showing people being loaded off planes and sent to the CECOT mega-prison. Vasquez Sura said she recognized her husband in photos, and video from the prison where he was being dragged by guards, because of the scars on his head and tattoos.
On March 24, 2025, Vasquez Sura filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of her husband against the Trump administration in the District of Maryland. The suit argued that because of the 2019 order barring him from being sent to El Salvador, the Trump administration violated the law.
Abrego Garcia’s team asked a judge to order the government to immediately request his release, launching the ongoing legal battle over whether he will remain in a Salvadoran prison or return to Maryland.
The post What we know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, man mistakenly deported to El Salvador appeared first on NBC News.
