For months and months, the full weight of the White House’s propaganda and legal operation has been brutally bearing down on the family of one day laborer from Maryland. Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been shipped off to a megaprison in El Salvador, falsely depicted as a violent gang member, smeared by federal government agencies, and—now that he’s back in the United States—is being criminally prosecuted. He has faced perhaps the most crazed vendetta ever waged by a president of the United States against a single individual.
That has thrust Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a young mother of three who is Abrego Garcia’s wife, into her own unique role: Amid Donald Trump’s lawless, cruel, arbitrary, and increasingly violent immigration crackdown, Vasquez has emerged as the public face of perseverance.
For months throughout this saga, Abrego Garcia himself has been out of sight, allegedly getting tortured in a foreign maximum-security prison. It was only when Senator Chris Van Hollen showed up outside its gates in April that we glimpsed him ever so fleetingly. When the Trump administration finally relented and agreed to bring him home—only to dubiously prosecute him for trafficking in migrants—we saw him again. He received bail and was released, but ICE has detained him yet again and is trying to deport him to Uganda.
All throughout, it has fallen on Vasquez to speak publicly about the ordeal her family has endured and to keep the media spotlight trained on his case. After Van Hollen’s trip surfaced photos of Abrego Garcia in the national media, Vasquez went on Good Morning America and declared, “The most important thing for me, my children, his mom, his brother, his sibling, was to see him alive, and we saw him alive.”
In so doing, Vasquez has become a kind of national symbol of the suffering now being experienced by countless other family members of those getting caught up in Trump’s dragnet. Born and raised in Virginia, Vasquez had two children, one with epilepsy and one with autism, with another man who reportedly physically abused her. She then met Abrego Garcia (a Salvadoran who in 2011 had come here illegally) in 2016 and became pregnant again a few years later. It’s at this point that Abrego Garcia was arrested the first time—they married while he was in detention. Then in 2019 a judge granted him a form of protected status barring his removal to El Salvador, which is what made the administration’s rendition of him illegal.
Appallingly, Vasquez confirmed what had happened to her husband when she saw news media images of him in El Salvadoran detention. And precisely because Trump and Stephen Miller calculated that correcting their error would show unacceptable weakness—and because bureaucratic subjugation would excite the MAGA base—Vasquez and the family have since had to endure a monthslong, whole-of-government campaign of state-sponsored barbarism and malicious propaganda. The infuriating bad-faith claim that only El Salvador could return Abrego Garcia, the dim-witted use of the bureaucracy to produce fake “evidence” of his MS-13 status, the nonsensical excuses for not offering him due process—in many cases these came from the very top, from the vice president and president themselves.
After Vasquez gained national exposure amid multiple media appearances drawing attention to her family’s plight, media organizations dug deeply into the family’s private lives. They discovered that she had sought orders of protection against Abrego Garcia. Here again it fell on Vasquez—who had been juggling disabled children amid the horrifying uncertainty of not knowing what will become of her husband—to speak to the media about what had happened.
Vasquez allowed that their marriage had seen rough patches. But she added: “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling. Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect.” Regardless, it’s an absolute outrage that their marital problems were blared forth through the government’s propaganda apparatus, as if this spectacle somehow constitutes an excuse to wrongfully rendition someone to a foreign country to face apparent torture.
If Abrego Garcia is not deported first, an American jury will now decide his fate. In the meantime, countless people like Vasquez right now are watching loved ones get deported, or snatched off the streets, or thrown into hastily erected detention centers with horrifically inhumane conditions and a deliberate mission of maximizing misery. Vasquez’s suffering is their suffering. And her perseverance is their perseverance.
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