The U.S. Government’s Extraordinary Pursuit of Kilmar Ábrego García

After a pair of federal judges in Tennessee had cleared the way for Kilmar Ábrego García to be released from pretrial detention, on August 22nd, so that he could spend a couple of days with his family before a scheduled check-in at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore, he was taken directly to a nearby hotel. The first thing he did was change into a new set of clothes that his wife, Jennifer Vasquez, had bought for him. Then he was given some flowers and ushered into a small room where Vasquez, their three children, other relatives, and supporters were waiting. He picked up his youngest son as people chanted, “¡Sí, se pudo!”—something like “Yes, we did!”

The child had been in a car with Ábrego García when ICE arrested him, near their home in Maryland, on March 12th. The arrest occurred during the government’s scramble to fly hundreds of people—mostly Venezuelans it claimed were members of the Tren de Aragua gang—to be incarcerated in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, under the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act. (A federal appeals court in New Orleans has since ruled that President Donald Trump had improperly invoked the law.) Days later, Ábrego García, a Salvadoran native, was sent to CECOT on a plane with some of them, beginning one of the highest-profile campaigns of retribution against an individual person of Trump’s second term.

On March 24th, lawyers for Ábrego García and his family filed a civil lawsuit demanding his return, and the courts quickly ruled that he had been deported in error. His entanglement with ICE had begun six years earlier, in March, 2src19, when the Prince George’s County police department, in Maryland, arrested him and three other day laborers outside a Home Depot. (More recently, he has been employed as a sheet-metal worker.) He sought asylum and the right to not be refouled, or forcibly returned to a place where one is subject to persecution—in his case, to El Salvador. An immigration judge in Baltimore denied him the asylum request but granted him the latter, in a “withholding of removal,” which allowed him to work in the U.S. without risk of being sent back to his home country. The judge found that he had a “well-founded fear” of persecution there, on account of official corruption and a history of extortionist demands and death threats from a local gang, against both him and his family, who ran a pupusa business.

Eduardo Zelaya, a Salvadoran organizer with CASA—one of the immigrants’-rights organizations that, alongside a team of immigration lawyers, has been advocating for Ábrego García’s freedom since March—was with him in Tennessee. “Seeing the family reunified felt like a victory,” he told me in Spanish. “But, at the same time, it felt like the beginning of a battle.”

That battle had started during the effort to secure his release. Ábrego García had finally been returned from El Salvador on June 6th—but to Tennessee, not to Maryland, and only once the government had filed a new set of charges, in an indictment, accusing him of unlawfully transporting undocumented immigrants across state lines. The federal magistrate judge in Tennessee handling pretrial matters in the new case, Barbara Holmes, finding that he posed no risk of flight or danger to other people, had ordered him released on June 22nd to await trial. But that release was delayed for two months, as officials, in public and before judges in Maryland and Tennessee, offered shifting explanations as to the government’s intentions with the indictment. Did the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security want Ábrego García to face, as Attorney General Pam Bondi has put it, “American justice”? If so, he’s presumed innocent until proved otherwise, in a criminal court of law. Or did they want him to face the deportation system right away, and remove him to a country other than El Salvador under the immigration laws? If so, there would be a process for that in immigration court. What the government could not pursue is both courses at once.

Faced with this legal reality, on the night of Thursday, August 21st, hours before Ábrego García was to be released, ICE devised a choice for him. He could agree to delay his release until the following Monday, and then be deported to Costa Rica, whose government had just committed to granting him refugee status or residency—in exchange for pleading guilty to the federal indictment in Tennessee. Or, he could be released as planned, decline the plea offer, report to his scheduled appointment at the ICE field office in Baltimore, and risk being deported this time, inexplicably, to Uganda, if he chose to await trial. His criminal-defense team in Tennessee, which is seeking to have the indictment thrown out as a “vindictive and selective prosecution,” immediately brought this development to the attention of Waverly Crenshaw, the U.S. district judge overseeing the prosecution, stating, “There can be only one interpretation of these events: the DOJ, DHS, and ICE are using their collective powers to force Mr. Abrego to choose between a guilty plea followed by relative safety, or rendition to Uganda, where his safety and liberty would be under threat.” (The government has since said that it plans to deport him instead to Eswatini; on Thursday, Reuters reported that the African nation had no knowledge of this arrangement.)

Ábrego García preferred to be released as scheduled, and, when he arrived for his ICE appointment in Baltimore, hundreds of supporters were waiting outside, including members of Congress, state and local officials, and faith leaders. “When he goes in that building, we’ll be supporting him. We continue to fight. No matter what happens in there today, we got his back,” Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, said. Ábrego García read a prepared statement, in Spanish. “I want you to always remember that today I can say with pride that I am free and reunited with my family,” he said. Moments with his loved ones had given him the “strength and hope to continue this fight.” Speaking of others who have been detained under the Trump Administration, he said, “God is with us. He will never leave us. He will bring justice to all the injustice they’ve done.”