The police detective who accused a mistakenly deported Maryland dad of being a member of the gang MS-13 was suspended days later for leaking confidential information to a woman he was paying for sex.
President Donald Trump’s administration has admitted Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to the Salvadoran mega prison CECOT because of an “administrative error” but has refused to facilitate his return. Officials have repeatedly claimed he is a member of the MS-13 gang based upon a single flimsy allegation made in a field interview report from 2019.
In Abrego Garcia’s complaint, his attorneys wrote that they were never able to cross-examine the police detective who wrote the report because he was suspended soon after he interviewed Abrego Garcia. His allegation is the only evidence the government has ever produced to support its MS-13 claim.
The complaint doesn’t say who the detective was or why he or she was suspended. But a report from The New Republic has revealed him to be a 10-year police veteran named Ivan Mendez.
Mendez was suspended on April 3, 2019 for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts,” the department announced in a press release at the time.
His name appears on the interview report, and the police inspector in Prince George County, Maryland, confirmed to The New Republic that Mendez was the lead investigator on Abrego Garcia’s case.
He had provided the woman information about an ongoing investigation and was reported by other officers, according to The Washington Post. He was later indicted, pleaded guilty and received probation for the misdemeanor offense.
Just days before his suspension, Mendez had interviewed Abrego Garcia at the Prince George County Police Department.
The El Salvador native had fled his home country in 2011 at age 16 after gang members threatened to kill him over his family’s pupusa business. He was undocumented and was hanging around a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested alongside three other day laborers.
Police questioned him about gang activity, but after he said multiple times that he didn’t have any information, they turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without charging him with any crimes.
Mendez nevertheless filled out a “Gang Field Interview Sheet” and wrote that a confidential informant had identified Abrego Garcia as a member of the MS-13 Westerns clique. The Westerns operated in New York, a state Abrego Garcia had never lived in.
Four days later, on April 1, 2019, Mendez’s fellow officers reported him for leaking information to the sex worker. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia received a notice to appear at a deportation hearing since he had entered the country illegally.
During his first removal hearing on April 24, 2019, Abrego Garcia’s attorney requested bond, but ICE objected that Abrego Garcia was a danger to the community. He had been detained “in connection with a murder investigation,” and local police had “verified” he was gang member, ICE wrote on his federal “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” form.
In fact, he had been detained for loitering outside the Home Depot, according to the Mendez’s “Gang Field Interview Sheet.”
Based on the two documents, the judge denied bail, even though legal experts say the evidence was a form of double hearsay: a detective who hadn’t been cross-examined making an accusation based on an unidentified informant who also hasn’t been cross examined.
When Abrego Garcia’s lawyer tried to question the detective, he was told Mendez had been suspended. Nobody else from the gang unit was willing to answer questions, according to the complaint. Neither city nor county police had any incident reports that mentioned Abrego Garcia. Even the Home Depot arrest report only named the three other men who were arrested.
The attorney filed a motion for a subpoena to compel the police department’s detectives to testify and provide any evidence they had about Abrego Garcia’s alleged gang membership. But the ICE attorney said on the record there wasn’t any other evidence.
Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and was granted a “withholding of removal” order, a legal form of protection that says the government won’t deport someone to their home country if the person is “more likely than not” to face persecution there.
Despite the protective order, on Mar. 12 of this year, Abrego Garcia—who married a U.S. citizen and was working full-time as a sheet metal apprentice—had just picked up his 5-year-old son from the boy’s grandmother’s house after his shift when ICE officers pulled him over.
They said his immigration status had changed, then arrested him and called his wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura. Once she arrived to get their son, he was taken away without explanation.
Three days later, he was deported to CECOT.
As Abrego Garcia’s case has played out in court over the past few weeks, the Department of Justice has not presented any evidence in court showing gang affiliations. The government has “abandoned” its position that he was a “danger to the community,” a federal appeals court found.
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