In the weeks since Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador, the federal government and his family have presented divergent portraits of the man who has become the face of President Donald Trump’s crackdown against immigration.
In the government’s description, Abrego Garcia is a gang member — and now a terrorist — with a history of violence and shady associations who “belongs behind bars and off American soil.” The government also released documents showing that his wife told police he had been violent with her multiple times.
But she and others in his family also described him as a hardworking man and caring father who fled gang violence as a teenager to start a new life in the US and who remained dedicated to providing for his family until his arrest on March 12.
“It’s been 50 days,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Abrego Garcia, told an audience in Washington’s Lafayette Square on Thursday. “Fifty days of pain and suffering, 50 days of uncertainty.” She called on the US and Salvadoran governments to “stop playing political games with my husband’s life.”
Trump, for his part, told ABC News in an interview last week that Abrego Garcia was an “MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie, been in lots of skirmishes, beat the hell out of his wife, and the wife was petrified to even talk about him, OK? This is not an innocent, wonderful gentleman from Maryland.”
At least initially, both sides agreed that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador — and subsequent imprisonment in the country’s notorious mega-prison — was a mistake, the result of a clerical error that moved him up on a list to land on a flight manifest. A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official called it an “administrative error” in a court declaration. But other Trump administration officials have since publicly abandoned that position and called him “a terrorist,” because the US has designated MS-13 a terrorist organization.
Abrego Garcia’s deportation has been the basis of a fraught legal battle that’s included tense confrontations between a federal judge in Maryland and the Justice Department, eventually landing at the Supreme Court, which has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process,” the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a recent ruling in the case.
To report a fuller picture of Abrego Garcia’s life not presented in court documents or descriptions from his lawyers, CNN spoke to more than a dozen people who know him, reporting from the neighborhoods in El Salvador where he spent his formative years working for his mother and dodging gang threats and from towns in suburban Maryland where he would eventually settle and begin building a life in the United States.
‘If you didn’t pay, they threatened to kill’
The El Salvador that Abrego Garcia fled as a teen in 2011 was different from the country he was forcibly returned to in March.
It was about a year before the Catholic Church helped broker a truce between the two major gangs operating in El Salvador — MS-13 and Barrio 18 — that brought some temporary reprieve to the country’s soaring murder rates, and a decade before a gang crackdown initiated by the now-president, Nayib Bukele, filled the country’s prisons with members of both gangs.
Abrego Garcia’s mother, Cecilia, ran a pupusería out of her home in Los Nogales, a middle-class neighborhood, where he was born in 1995. Abrego Garcia worked in the family business along with his father, brother and two sisters, according to a 2019 court order from the immigration judge overseeing his case. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy the supplies needed to make the pupusas, a popular Salvadoran stuffed flatbread, and run delivery routes about four days a week.
Francisco Sibrian, a friend of Abrego Garcia’s from Los Nogales, told CNN by email that Abrego Garcia was a typical kid — playing soccer, riding bikes and taking part in water balloon fights with his friends.
Abrego Garcia was “always the one who gathered the group in the neighborhood to play soccer,” Sibrian remembered.
“I knew him since we were kids,” Sibrian wrote. “I don’t know the exact age, but I stopped seeing him around 15, 16 years old when he left the country.”
“As far as I knew him here, he was never involved with gangs,” he added.
Two other people from the neighborhood who spoke with CNN but declined to provide their names described Abrego Garcia as a rambunctious kid who would sometimes get into fights as a teenager.
At some point, according to the 2019 immigration judge’s order that laid out Abrego Garcia’s broad account of his early life, members of Barrio 18 learned about the family business and began extorting money from his mother. The monthly visits from the gang to demand “rent” from Abrego Garcia’s family became weekly, and the gang threatened to harm Abrego Garcia; his older brother, Cesar; and other members of the family if they didn’t pay up.
After the family sent Cesar to the US because of gang threats against his life, members of Barrio 18 began trying to recruit Abrego Garcia, according to the immigration judge’s order, describing armed gang members watching him as he went to and from school.
After one instance in which the gang threatened to kidnap Abrego Garcia, his father, a former police officer, paid them off and the family moved to the “10 de Octubre” neighborhood about 10 minutes away by car, the judge’s order said.
Carmen Solís, who runs a small shop in 10 de Octubre, described to CNN being extorted by gang members in the neighborhood, where murals and whitewash now cover old graffiti.
Solís said a gang member would come by her shop about every week to collect a fee she was charged to operate her store. She had to pay about $100 a month in protection money.
“If you didn’t pay, they threatened to kill a family member or even yourself,” Solís recalled. “If you had teenagers, it was worse because they wanted them to join the gang. There were months when they asked for an extra fee because someone had been killed and they had to bury him, or if he was in prison, to pay for a lawyer.”
Gang members found Abrego Garcia’s family in 10 de Octubre and again began demanding money and trying to recruit the teenage boy — twice visiting his home, threatening to rape and kill his two sisters, and threatening Abrego Garcia himself, according to the judge’s order.
The family was so afraid for Abrego Garcia’s safety that they opted to keep him inside as much as they could, the order said. The family closed their shop and moved, once again, to another neighborhood, but the threats did not stop.
After about four months of this, the family decided to send Abrego Garcia to the United States, where he entered illegally around March 2012 — and eventually encountered a different kind of gang problem.
A pivotal arrest
The picture of Abrego Garcia’s life from his arrival in the United States in 2012 at age 16 to his first interaction with law enforcement in 2019 is less clear. What is known is that he settled in suburban Maryland, started a relationship with his now-wife and began working as a day laborer who sought work outside various Home Depot locations.
His arrest in 2019 outside of a Hyattsville Home Depot forms the basis of much of the government’s case that Abrego Garcia is a gang member, relying on a Prince George’s County police document stemming from a confidential informant and local law enforcement’s observations.
Abrego Garcia and three other men were standing outside the Home Depot when they were approached by a police officer, who then saw two of the men (it’s not clear whether Abrego Garcia was one of them) throw something out of their pants. The officer later found two plastic bottles containing marijuana nearby, he wrote in the gang field interview sheet.
Abrego Garcia was arrested and handed over to immigration authorities. His wife, Vasquez Sura, described what happened next:
“I hired a lawyer to get him out on bond. I attended his bond hearing and was shocked when the government said he should stay detained because Kilmar is an MS-13 gang member. Kilmar is not and has never been a gang member. I’m certain of that. Because of these false accusations, he was denied bond,” she wrote in a March court affidavit describing Abrego Garcia’s previous encounters with an immigration judge and contesting his deportation.
Generally, immigration judges may default to the evidence presented by ICE and law enforcement, leaving it to the individual — in this case, Abrego Garcia — to rebut the claims, instead of having law enforcement prove them. The immigration judge in Abrego Garcia’s case also made reference to his traffic violations.
While the immigration judge didn’t make a definitive finding on whether Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, the evidence was enough to deny him release from ICE detention.
Abrego Garcia remained in ICE detention while he went through immigration proceedings. He had a hearing in August and September 2019. He made his case to a judge that he feared a possible return to El Salvador, while the government argued he was a gang member.
Months after his arrest — Abrego Garcia got married and became a father while in custody — immigration Judge David Jones ruled in his favor and prohibited his removal to his home country.
“His testimony was internally consistent, externally consistent with his asylum application and other documents, and appeared free of embellishment,” Jones said in his ruling, referring to Abrego Garcia’s account of why he feared persecution in El Salvador, later adding: “The court finds the Respondent credible.”
In its ongoing efforts to prove Abrego Garcia’s membership in a gang, the government continues to point toward a Chicago Bulls hat he wore during that 2019 arrest and tattoos of symbols including a cross and a skull on his fingers.
Trump himself has repeatedly touted a photo showing those symbols and what appeared to be digitally added annotations showing “MS13” on Abrego Garcia’s knuckles. Gang experts who have studied MS-13 have told CNN the actual symbols on his fingers are not recognized indicators of membership in the gang.
The government has further described him as a human trafficker because he was pulled over on a trip from Texas to Maryland with multiple people in the car and no luggage. Abrego Garcia was not arrested, and his wife said he frequently transported other workers between job sites.
The government has also taken the unusual step of publishing two requests for protective orders that Vasquez Sura filed early in the couple’s marriage, reflecting that she told police her husband became violent with her during arguments multiple times. Vasquez Sura has said she and Abrego Garcia worked through those issues, and that they don’t justify his removal to El Salvador.
Life in Maryland
Abrego Garcia, along with his wife and three children, two of whom are from her previous relationship, lived in Temple Hills for a time before moving to Beltsville.
Outside Abrego Garcia’s Beltsville home, children’s toys are scattered in front of the yard. One neighbor told CNN that he remembered seeing Abrego Garcia outside with his children and scoffed at the idea he belonged to any gang. The owner of a nearby Latino grocery store said she often saw Abrego Garcia shopping with his children and that he seemed like a dedicated father.
Abrego Garcia most recently was a unionized sheet-metal worker. He worked on the University of Maryland hospital in downtown Baltimore — the job he was returning from when immigration officers detained him in March.
Michael Coleman, president of the union that includes sheet-metal workers, said that while he never had direct contact with Abrego Garcia, others who did told him Abrego Garcia got along well with people, loved his family and consistently showed up for work.
Many laborers who gathered on a hill outside the Hyattsville Home Depot that was the scene of Abrego Garcia’s 2019 arrest told CNN recently they had recognized Abrego Garcia from the news but didn’t remember working with him.
One man, who gave his first name as Manuel, said he recognized Abrego Garcia from a photo but wasn’t aware of his deportation until CNN told him about it. He said he had met Abrego Garcia, whom he described as a “nice guy” and “hard worker,” outside a different Home Depot.
Thousands of miles to the south, Abrego Garcia is now in a different prison than the one he was originally taken to. After intervention from Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the Salvadoran government allowed Abrego Garcia to meet the senator when he traveled to El Salvador last month to demand the release of his constituent.
Van Hollen said Abrego Garcia described being “traumatized” at the notorious CECOT prison where he was originally held. The senator said Abrego Garcia was moved from the maximum-security prison into another facility, where “conditions are better.”
Still, his contact with the outside world remains limited, and it isn’t clear how much is filtering to Abrego Garcia about the political debate raging over his case.
“Kilmar,” Vasquez Sura said at the rally Thursday, “if you can hear me, I love you, and keep your faith in God. Know that the children and I are still fighting for you to come back home.”
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