ICE error draws ire after Maryland father deported to El Salvador prison

Carson Swick and Jonathan M. Pitts, Baltimore Sun on Apr 1, 2025

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The “administrative error” that caused a Maryland man’s deportation to a notorious prison in El Salvador has prompted backlash in Congress and beyond.

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old citizen of El Salvador, was arrested March 12 after working a shift as a sheet metal worker apprentice in Baltimore. He was deported three days later to the Terrorism Confinement Center in his home country, which activists say has been wracked with human rights abuses under El Salvador’s president, self-described dictator Nayib Bukele.

Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin brought up Abrego Garcia’s deportation Tuesday during a joint hearing of two House Judiciary subcommittees about federal judges’ injunctions.

“He’s a Marylander married to a U.S. citizen who has a 5-year-old son with autism and he went to pick up his son, but he was picked up first by ICE,” Raskin said. “And then he was shackled and put on that airplane and shipped off to the torturers of El Salvador without ever having the benefit of those two most beautiful words in the English language: Due process.”

A Raskin aide told The Baltimore Sun that Abrego Garcia lives in Beltsville. Abrego Garcia’s wife and 5-year-old child are U.S. citizens, according to the court filing.

Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Silver Spring lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, says his client was granted “Withholding of Removal” status and had a legal work permit issued by the Department of Homeland Security. A judge ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia could not be deported because it was “more likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs,” according to a complaint filed by Sandoval-Moshenberg.

The complaint said Abrego Garcia left El Salvador at age 16 to escape gang-sponsored violence and the extortion of his family, but Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Sun he does not recall when his client immigrated to the U.S.

According to the filing, Abrego Garcia’s wife did not know where her husband was until she saw him in photos and videos from the prison last month. She was able to identify her husband by his unique tattoos and scars on his head, the filing said.

Though he has no violent criminal history in the U.S. or El Salvador, the extent of Abrego Garcia’s involvement with gangs seems unclear.

The filing shows that during a previous bond hearing, a “confidential informant” advised U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that Abrego was an “active member” of MS-13. During this hearing, the judge ruled he was a danger to the community — a ruling Abrego Garcia never legally challenged.

In an overnight X post Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance implied Abrego Garcia had “no legal right” to remain in the U.S. because he is not a citizen.

“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” Vance wrote in response to actor Jon Favreau’s post about the situation. “My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg claimed the Trump administration has no substantial evidence of Abrego Garcia’s supposed status as an MS-13 member, or of his involvement in any crimes committed by the gang.

“We dispute that he’s a gang member, we think those are baseless allegations from a confidential informant that never amounted to anything,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Sun. “But regardless, there are immigration courts where they could have made that argument, where they could have filed that evidence. They didn’t.”

Public records show Abrego Garcia was charged with four driving-related offenses in Maryland between 2016 and 2018. These offenses include three separate charges of driving on a suspended license during a 40-day period in the summer of 2016, and as well as a driving on a highway without a license charge in April 2018.

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