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, 2019, 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.