In the weeks since Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador, the federal government and his family have presented divergent portraits of the man who has become the face of President Donald Trump’s crackdown against immigration.
In the government’s description, Abrego Garcia is a gang member — and now a terrorist — with a history of violence and shady associations who “belongs behind bars and off American soil.” The government also released documents showing that his wife told police he had been violent with her multiple times.
But she and others in his family also described him as a hardworking man and caring father who fled gang violence as a teenager to start a new life in the US and who remained dedicated to providing for his family until his arrest on March 12.
“It’s been 50 days,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Abrego Garcia, told an audience in Washington’s Lafayette Square on Thursday. “Fifty days of pain and suffering, 50 days of uncertainty.” She called on the US and Salvadoran governments to “stop playing political games with my husband’s life.”
Trump, for his part, told ABC News in an interview last week that Abrego Garcia was an “MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie, been in lots of skirmishes, beat the hell out of his wife, and the wife was petrified to even talk about him, OK? This is not an innocent, wonderful gentleman from Maryland.”
At least initially, both sides agreed that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador — and subsequent imprisonment in the country’s notorious mega-prison — was a mistake, the result of a clerical error that moved him up on a list to land on a flight manifest. A senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official called it an “administrative error” in a court declaration. But other Trump administration officials have since publicly abandoned that position and called him “a terrorist,” because the US has designated MS-13 a terrorist organization.
Abrego Garcia’s deportation has been the basis of a fraught legal battle that’s included tense confrontations between a federal judge in Maryland and the Justice Department, eventually landing at the Supreme Court, which has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process,” the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a recent ruling in the case.
To report a fuller picture of Abrego Garcia’s life not presented in court documents or descriptions from his lawyers, We spoke to more than a dozen people who know him, reporting from the neighborhoods in El Salvador where he spent his formative years working for his mother and dodging gang threats and from towns in suburban Maryland where he would eventually settle and begin building a life in the United States.
‘If you didn’t pay, they threatened to kill’
The El Salvador that Abrego Garcia fled as a teen in 2011 was different from the country he was forcibly returned to in March.
It was about a year before the Catholic Church helped broker a truce between the two major gangs operating in El Salvador — MS-13 and Barrio 18 — that brought some temporary reprieve to the country’s soaring murder rates, and a decade before a gang crackdown initiated by the now-president, Nayib Bukele, filled the country’s prisons with members of both gangs.
Abrego Garcia’s mother, Cecilia, ran a pupusería out of her home in Los Nogales, a middle-class neighborhood, where he was born in 1995. Abrego Garcia worked in the family business along with his father, brother and two sisters, according to a 2019 court order from the immigration judge overseeing his case. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy the supplies needed to make the pupusas, a popular Salvadoran stuffed flatbread, and run delivery routes about four days a week.
Francisco Sibrian, a friend of Abrego Garcia’s from Los Nogales, told us by email that Abrego Garcia was a typical kid — playing soccer, riding bikes and taking part in water balloon fights with his friends.
Abrego Garcia was “always the one who gathered the group in the neighborhood to play soccer,” Sibrian remembered.
“I knew him since we were kids,” Sibrian wrote. “I don’t know the exact age, but I stopped seeing him around 15, 16 years old when he left the country.”
“As far as I knew him here, he was never involved with gangs,” he added.
Two other people from the neighborhood who spoke with us but declined to provide their names described Abrego Garcia as a rambunctious kid who would sometimes get into fights as a teenager.
