The details behind Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s arrest could not be more everyday or mundane.
He had just picked up his five-year-old from school in suburban Maryland. It was a Wednesday, March 12th. He and his wife stopped off at an Ikea when immigration officials approached their parked car. He was arrested, taken to Baltimore and three days later was returned, shackled and handcuffed, on a flight to his native El Salvador and to his worst nightmares.
Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, claims he originally left El Salvador to escape persecution from a criminal gang known as Barrio 18.
Garcia was imprisoned on the grounds that he was a member of another violent criminal gang, MS-13, an accusation he and his family deny. He told Maryland Democratic senator Chris Van Hollen, who visited him in El Salvador last week, that when arrested and deported he had no idea where he and the other prisoners were being taken. Finding himself back in El Salvador, in a prison where he faced taunts from other inmates, had left him traumatised, he said.
While Garcia languishes in jail, the circumstances and fact of his deportation have become one of the key ideological flashpoints between the Republican administration and its Democratic opposition. In the decade since Garcia first entered the United States, illegally crossing the border at McAllen, Texas, he acquired a police record that has been a source of contentious interpretation across the political divide.
He was arrested in 2019 and was charged with MS-13 membership on the grounds that his clothing – a Chicago Bulls basketball cap and certain tattoos – denoted an affiliation with the gang. He was also travelling alongside a known MS-13 member. But Garcia fought the charge, and an immigration judge ruled against his deportation on the grounds that he would be vulnerable to a credible fear of persecution by Barrio 18.
Since then, he has obtained a work permit and had started a family with Vazquez Sera. Immigration officials admitted that Garcia was deported due to an administrative error and on April 10th the US supreme court upheld a ruling that Garcia’s removal to El Salvador was illegal and ordered the government to facilitate his return, with a 9-0 ruling.
The Trump administration has bristled against what it perceives as the liberal media’s portrayal of Garcia as a wholesome Maryland family man callously snatched and disappeared from the streets by immigration officials. They point to his 2019 arrest and to a court protection order that his wife sought against him in 2021.
Last week, she sought to clarify the circumstances involved: “After surviving domestic violence in a previous relationship, I acted out of caution following a disagreement with Kilmar by seeking a civil protective order, in case things escalated. Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process. We were able to work through the situation privately as a family, including by going to counselling.”
The Democratic argument is that irrespective of Garcia’s potential involvement in MS-13, he has been denied due process and if he can simply be spirited from the country, then anyone can. The Republican counter view is that two federal judges concluded that Garcia was indeed a MS-13 gang member based on confidential information they had reviewed.
“The press in this room has this story wrong, and we have seen more and more evidence come to the table that we have had all along,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday when the issue was raised. “The president was always on the right side of this issue to deport this illegal criminal from our community and it is despicable to see the media continue to refer to this individual as just a peaceful man living his life in Maryland. This was and always has been an illegal criminal and MS-13 gang member and a designated foreign terrorist.”
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and a Trump adviser on homeland security, appeared on the Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday evening to present the Garcia case as a clear-cut choice for all Americans.
“It is a clear and present danger to the national security of this country and we have federal judges telling President Trump that he can’t deport these threats from our communities,” Miller said in his customary tone of moral outrage.
“This is the choice facing every American. Either we all side and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities or we let a rogue radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus.”
The problem with this interpretation, for the Trump administration, is that it ignores a supreme court ruling.
A Fox News poll this week on Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office was reported as sympathetically as possible by the host network but there was no disguising the dismaying numbers for the White House. The disastrous global fiscal response to “Liberation Day” has sent a cold shiver through economic forecasts that have clearly worried many Americans. The president’s overall approval rating has dropped to 44 per cent as he approaches the 100-day milestone.
Nearly 60 per cent of respondents disapprove of his handling of inflation – a key election promise – and his tariffs policy. With signs that the administration’s patience in seeking a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine is beginning to waver and the clock ticking on the 90-day tariff pause, the mood is fretful. Improving border security stands as the chief triumph according to the poll – which Trump rejected on social media.
But the ongoing refusal to accede to the supreme court’s ruling has begun to cloud that good news story for the Republicans. Van Hollen had no sooner returned from his visit to El Salvador, to meet Garcia, than four other Democratic congressional representatives flew out to try to meet the prisoner and push for his release.
Several prominent Democrats have questioned whether the Garcia issue is one on which they should be fighting the Republicans, reflecting the party’s internal turmoil over how to proceed in the wake of its November election catastrophe.
Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar argues that the Trump administration is happy to use the Garcia controversy as a distraction from the fact “that costs are up, chaos is up, corruption is up and the market is down” as a consequence of the tariffs uncertainty.
California governor Gavin Newsom, who has made cautious gestures in presenting himself as a plausible 2028 presidential candidate, faced criticism for clumsily referring to the Garcia case as a “distraction”. Van Hollen responded that it’s “never wrong to fight for the constitutional rights of one person because if we give up on one person’s rights we threaten everybody’s rights. And I would say that anyone who is not prepared to stand up and fight for the constitution doesn’t deserve to lead”.
It is clear that at least a significant number of prominent Democrats will continue to loudly advocate for Garcia. On Wednesday, US district judge Paula Xinis expressed displeasure at how the administration has handled the case, accusing it of behaving in “bad faith”.
Garcia’s family and lawyers are adamant they will fight to bring him back to the United States. The administration is equally insistent that that cannot happen. National interest in the case has been muted by the general unease over the direction of the economy and, perhaps too, by the difficulty in imagining the terror of being lifted by federal officials from a suburban American car park and, three days later, flown to prison in a different country, without any form of judicial process, or explanation, or clarity as to when or if one might ever get one’s life back.
