Pastor Heber D. Paredes voted for President Trump and has photos of himself at the White House, his head bowed in prayer alongside former Vice President Mike Pence.
That was a different time, he said — before the second Trump administration began detaining immigrant honor students, before it deported Latino parents with American-born children, and before it plucked Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the same county in suburban Maryland where Mr. Paredes ministers to a congregation full of immigrants.
A sheet metal worker who had been living in the United States for more than 10 years, Mr. Abrego Garcia wasn’t supposed to have been deported. But for weeks, the Trump administration repeatedly rebuffed a federal judge’s demands that he be returned to the country from El Salvador.
Last week, the government finally did bring him back after filing charges that he had helped smuggle migrants. On Friday morning, Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is expected to appear in a federal courtroom in Nashville to be arraigned on the charges, which have kept him in jail since his return to the United States.
For many in Mr. Paredes’s congregation, Mr. Abrego Garcia and his fate have come to feel all too resonant, a local man grabbed by federal agents and spirited out of the country with no apparent due process.
“I think they have made him suffer unnecessarily,” Mr. Paredes said of Trump officials. “We are following what is happening with him because what is happening with him could happen to any one of us.”
Indeed, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation and the dramatic legal fight that ensued became a defining early episode in the Trump administration’s campaign to deport hundreds of thousands of people. To its champions, the effort is long overdue. To critics, it represents a dangerous overreach.
But in Prince George’s County, Md., where Mr. Abrego Garcia had been living, and where Latino immigrants make up a big share of the population, he has come to represent something more visceral: a reminder that Latinos have been bearing the brunt of the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
In interviews across the area in recent months, Latino residents spoke of feeling under scrutiny, regardless of their immigration status or their ties to the community.
At his church in Landover Hills, Iglesia Roca De La Eternidad, Mr. Paredes reckoned with this notion, his votes for the president and the strict immigration dragnet he once backed. He said he believed plenty of “rotten apples” had managed to enter the country when the number of migrants who crossed the southern border last winter reached record levels.
“Of course, we are not in favor of having criminals here,” he said. But the Trump administration’s operations, based on the scenes he had seen in news reports, he said, amounted to ethnic profiling. Officials, he said, were taking “many hard-working, honorable and Christian people.”
A majority of voters support Mr. Trump’s efforts to deport those in the country illegally, according to polling from the New York Time and Siena College and CBS/YouGov. Mr. Trump made inroads with Latino voters — especially among men — in the 2024 presidential election, when he made pledges to enact the largest deportation project in the nation’s history a signature of his campaign.
But as Mr. Abrego’s case unfolds in Nashville, and as the Trump administration mounts a show of military force in response to immigrant rights protests in Los Angeles, cracks appear to be emerging in the president’s Latino support. A poll released on Wednesday by Equis, a Democratic-leaning research group focused on Latino voters, found about 60 percent of the demographic disapproved of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration; around 40 percent approved.
Several Republican Latino legislators at the state and federal levels have broken with the president over the denial of due process rights to deportees like Mr. Abrego Garcia and the arrests of immigrants at courthouses. Online on Saturday, as demonstrations began gaining momentum in Los Angeles, Ileana Garcia, a state senator in Florida and co-founder of Latinas for Trump, called the methods “to hunt down people” arbitrary and inhumane.
In Prince George’s County, 24.6 percent of the population is Latino. The county, which borders Washington, D.C., has the second-largest number of Salvadoran immigrants in the state. Many working-class Hispanic families live clustered in towering apartment complexes, often with jobs in house cleaning, food services and construction.
In some neighborhoods, it is not uncommon to see women picking up their children in embroidered Mayan skirts known as cortes — or street vendors selling papas fritas, rolled tortilla chips and colorful hand-woven baskets at makeshift stands.
Latino residents acknowledged that aspects of Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case were not simple. The government has called him a member of the transnational gang MS-13, partly based on his clothing and tattoos, though his family and his lawyers have said he is not a gang member. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi have sought to emphasize past accusations of domestic abuse.
At Don Ramon, a Mexican and Salvadoran restaurant just outside Prince George’s County that Mr. Abrego Garcia was known to frequent, Edval G. Lopes, 50, said he had sympathy for the families of Mr. Abrego Garcia and other men that the Trump administration deported to El Salvador before they had a chance to challenge the government’s assertion that they were gang members.
Yet Mr. Lopes remained steadfast behind the president’s push for mass deportations. “If there’s a mistake, let’s fix the mistake,” Mr. Lopes, a Brazilian immigrant and owner of a real estate company, said, sitting at the bar over a big bowl of caldo de res, or beef soup. “But let’s continue with the campaign. I think safety first.”
Most Latino residents interviewed — whether documented or undocumented — thought Mr. Abrego Garcia should not have been deported. The New York Times/Siena College polling in April that found that just one-third of voters approved of him being deported, while half disapproved.
Nohemi Martinez, 33, who cleans homes in Beltsville, Md. said Mr. Abrego Garcia and his unfair treatment were among the reasons for a topic of conversation at her family dinner table nearly every night: “What do we do — do we go, do we stay?”
“We are fighting to stay here legally — to do things right — but this situation is stressful,” said Ms. Martinez, who said she has been seeking asylum since she crossed the Texas border with her young son two years ago after leaving Guatemala.
At Iglesia Roca De La Eternidad, where patrons sang hymns and asked God for guidance through illness and turbulent immigration cases, Mr. Paredes said Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case struck a personal chord because Mr. Paredes, a naturalized American citizen, had been undocumented when he first entered the United States from Guatemala 40 years ago.
Marcelo Espinoza, a Bolivian American software developer who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 and 2024, said he doubted he would cast a ballot for anyone in the Trump orbit in the future. “The form in which people have been taken away has seemed very unjust,” Mr. Espinoza said of deportations like Mr. Abrego’s.
Dropping off her son at Bible class the next day, Janis Hernandez, 31, a restaurant cashier and Salvadoran immigrant in the process of getting permanent legal residency, said her co-workers and friends were divided over Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case.
Nonetheless, she said she saw him as a symbol of her Salvadoran community — “of the fear we feel,” she said.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
Ruth Igielnik is a Times polling editor who conducts polls and analyzes and reports on the results.
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