By ERWIN FREED and AVA FAHY
Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a union sheet-metal worker, husband and father, and member of the immigrant advocacy group CASA—was finally released from a Tennessee jail on Friday, Aug. 22. Unfortunately, he was re-detained three days later, on the morning of Aug. 25, during an ICE “check-in.” A press conference organized by CASA brought hundreds of supporters to rally outside the ICE field office in Baltimore as he arrived for his “check-in” appointment.
Abrego Garcia’s release from prison and his subsequent re-detention marks a crucial but unresolved point in the movement against the ongoing crack-down on immigrants and civil liberties. The movement to free Abrego Garcia has shown that all of the Trump administration’s lies and slanders against him are baseless. It should be obvious that there is no “legal” justification for his continued detention. However, the movement cannot let down its guard; it must mobilize support against a new maneuver by the administration, which has led to the re-detention of Abrego Garcia.
As Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have pointed out, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security are working in “lockstep” to try to coerce him to plead guilty to bogus “human trafficking charges” in exchange for deportation to a “safe” country, where he would be given asylum. The federal government gave Abrego Garcia an ultimatum: If he did not plead guilty on Aug. 25 and accept deportation to Costa Rica, the government threatened to deport him to Uganda—a country where he does not speak the language and where he would be more vulnerable to human rights abuses.
It is obvious that the government was attempting to coerce Abrego Garcia into relinquishing his civil rights to due process in immigration proceedings. Abrego-Garcia bravely declined the terms of the ultimatum and peacefully accepted his re-detention, which was expected, at his ICE “check-in.” He was sent to a detention center in Virginia. A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily blocked Abrego Garcia’s deportation until at least after his evidentiary hearing takes place on Aug. 27.
Immigration policy analysts like Aaron Reichlin-Melnick speculate that if the U.S. government were to send him to Uganda, that country would then deport Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he would face threats of violence, and where it would technically be illegal for the United States to send him directly. Of course, the U.S. government already did just that when they sent Abrego Garcia, along with over 280 other detainees, to the CECOT torture center in El Salvador in mid-March.
Often left out of news reports on this situation is the fact that rapprochement between the United States and Nayib Bukele’s regime in El Salvador began during the Biden administration. In 2023, senior Biden officials began laundering Salvadoran President Bukele’s image and “courting” the hyper-corrupt, hyper-carceral regime. An article in The Dial reported that in September 2023, Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security, “[Alejandro] Mayorkas … applauded [El Salvador’s] state-of-exception arrests—whose victims are people like Juan Saúl Castillo Alberto, an employee of the Salvadoran public works agency who was arbitrarily detained and starved in prison. He died at age 32.” When Bukele accepted re-election the next summer, Mayorkas led a high-level diplomatic delegation to the country.
The kidnapping and the “case” against Kilmar
Quotations without attribution refer to this court filing: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.1.0.pdf
ICE and the entire federal government held Abrego Garcia behind bars since March 12. On that day, after working a full shift as an apprentice sheet metal worker, ICE HSI agents pulled over his car. Abrego Garcia had just picked up his son from his grandmother’s house, and the pair were on their way home. ICE agents told him only that his “status was changed,” while arresting him and threatening to send his son to Child Protective Services if his wife did not show up to the scene fast enough.
Born in the capital city, San Salvador, Kilmar Abrego Garcia fled the country at age 16 after years of being targeted by the Mara 18. The gang extorted his mother’s pupusa stand and threatened to kill Kilmar and his brothers if they didn’t join Mara 18. A U.S. immigration judge found Abrego Garcia’s story credible enough to grant him “withholding of removal” status, legally preventing the government from deporting him to El Salvador under the terms of the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture. Such relief is only granted to individuals who face a “clear probability of future persecution.”.
During his first evening in ICE detention, Abrego-Garcia spoke with his wife. He told her that he had been questioned about gang affiliations, repeatedly stated he had none, and “that he had been told that he would go before an immigration judge and then be released.” After his initial detention, Abrego-Garcia was moved to “various detention facilities around the country.” Along the way, he urgently told his wife that “El Salvador was asking for him.” As she desperately attempted to explain that “he had won protection from being removed to El Salvador” to ICE officials and agents, no one responded.
In a call at around 11 a.m. on March 15, Abrego Garcia “relayed that he was told that he was being deported to El Salvador. With a sense of urgency, he asked his wife to contact his mother so their family could get him from ‘CECOT,’ as that is where he was told they were sending him.” CECOT is a 40,000-bed concentration camp where physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of detainees are all institutionally supported.
Unfortunately, Abrego Garcia had been told the truth. At least 280 people, including him, were sent to CECOT as part of a psychological warfare operation meant to instill fear in immigrant communities.
Abrego Garcia, along with the rest of the people sent to CECOT, was horribly beaten and subjected to torture. Most of the people sent to CECOT, estimated at around 250, were Venezuelan men. While the Trump administration claimed they were members of the Venezuelan gang, ”Tren de Aragua,” even those charges were made up. Tren de Aragua barely exists in the United States, and the administration has not presented any evidence showing that any of the people deported to CECOT were gang members.
Instead, the deportation flights were riddled with alleged “administrative errors.” They included at least seven women, who were mistakenly sent to CECOT (an all-men’s prison) and, by the government’s own admission of error, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In 2019, an immigration judge ordered a stay of removal for Abrego Garcia, specifically barring the government from deporting him to El Salvador.
Ever since news of the CECOT deportations, solidarity with the deportees and disgust with the Trump administration’s crimes has largely congealed into the demand “Free Kilmar Abrego Garcia and all CECOT detainees.” All over the country, pictures of Abrego Garcia have flooded mass demonstrations against the anti-immigrant crackdown and general repression unleashed by the government. Everything the Feds do to try to justify targeting Abrego Garcia further exposes the arbitrary unlawfulness of not only immigration enforcement, but capitalist policing generally.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia had three main points of contact with law enforcement, all of which ended with him being allowed to remain in his community, and none of which resulted in his being charged with any crime.
The first was in 2019. At that time, Kilmar was detained along with other day laborers waiting for work. They were detained by a corrupt cop, Ivan Mendez, who weeks later would plead guilty to being a “John” and providing information to “commercial sex workers.” The “evidence” that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang was based on the words of a still unnamed “criminal informant” in a “gang field survey” sheet filled out by Mendez. The “gang field survey” was so broad as to be meaningless, and was outlawed by the state of Maryland shortly after Abrego Garcia’s initial detention. Similarly, the informant claimed that Abrego Garcia was part of an MS-13 “clique” located in New York, a state the government has never shown him to have had any connection with. During this period, from March 8 to Oct. 10, 2019, Abrego-Garcia was held in ICE detention. He had been immediately handed off to ICE by local police following his detention, although during his final hearing in this episode, he was neither convicted nor charged with any crimes.
The second contact with law enforcement were two reported domestic disputes, one in 2019 and one in 2020, when Abrego Garcia’s wife called the police during arguments. No charges were filed, and the couple appears to have had success with the help of a counselor. Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Kilmar’s wife, has directly blamed Abrego Garcia’s uncharacteristically aggressive behavior during this period on the trauma of having been placed in ICE detention.
The third was a brief traffic stop by the Tennessee Highway Patrol on Dec. 1, 2022. According to the government’s own account, Abrego Garcia was allegedly pulled over for “speeding” and not “maintaining” lanes. In the vehicle were “eight other individuals” whom Abrego Garcia told police he was bringing from Texas to Maryland “to perform construction work.” Abrego Garcia was let go with a warning, and no incident report was filed. However, the details of the traffic stop somehow ended up in the files of the “Combined Intelligence Unit” (CIU) of the ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations bureau.
From a quick review of documents, it is not clear what the CIU is. In any case, that unit’s report, combined with the word of a federal informant, Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, appear to be the basis of the White House’s insistence that Abrego Garcia is a “suspected human trafficker.” In actual fact, the informant in this case had previously been convicted of human trafficking and was the owner of the van Abrego Garcia was driving. Now, the Justice Department and DHS appear to be leveraging Reyes’ extensive criminal record to coerce him into painting Abrego Garcia as some sort of “human smuggling” kingpin.
It is apparent that none of these interactions with police give credence to any of the White House’s claims. There is no evidence that he is a member of MS-13, there is no evidence that he is a serial “wife beater,” and there is no evidence that he participated in “human trafficking,” as any reasonable person would understand it. On the last point, whatever status the people in his car might have had on Dec. 1, 2022, the federal government is now going out of its way to drop similar charges against Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, as well as charges for randomly shooting guns and other crimes, in order to receive testimony backing up their narrative demonizing Abrego Garcia.
Migrants are not political pawns! End ICE and CECOT terror! Hands off Kilmar Abrego-Garcia!
While tens of thousands of Salvadoran men languish in CECOT and other torture camps, almost 300 deportees sent from the United States were ultimately traded in order to release 10 “political” prisoners from Venezuelan jails. That list inexplicably includes Dahud Hanid Ortiz, who was convicted in Venezuela for a triple homicide carried out in Spain.
The CECOT negotiations are emblematic of the U.S. ruling class’s apparent emerging strategy towards brute force “negotiations” and the use of working people and media spectacle to orchestrate “foreign policy.” Trump’s second term has already become defined by making big pronouncements, followed by small “victories” claimed by the attention hungry press core. Along the way, the administration is willing to destroy countless peoples’ lives through arbitrary behavior meant to put targeted communities in a state of “shock and awe” and creating the general fear that speaking out will leave one behind bars.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s months-long ICE odyssey spans probably a half dozen states, multiple countries, and even multiple detention centers within El Salvador. He has been villainized and publicly slandered at every opportunity by the highest “authorities” in the United States. Attempts to deport him also show the weakness of the MAGA movement’s attempts to carry out “mass deportations” and to win popular support for their plans. Instead, “Hands off Abrego Garcia!” became a rallying point and unifying call for millions of people, who poured out in the streets to stand against the Trump administration.
Particularly now, as Abrego Garcia is once again incarcerated for the “crime” of moving across borders, the fight to defend him and end this petulant witch-hunt deserves support from all who care about democratic rights and understand that every successful step made in empowering and expanding the detention-deportation machine is also a successful rollback of everyone’s civil liberties.
There is no time to waste! “Keep Kilmar Abrego Garcia Home” must be the message on every shop floor, in every community space, and at every mobilization for working people and civil liberties.
