Kilmar Abrego Garcia:
Unjustly Targeted

Sep 1, 2025

A Maryland man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, went before an immigration judge in 2019, to argue he should have a protective order, since he came to the U.S. in 2011 to escape gangs harassing his family in El Salvador. At the time, he gained a status to prevent him from being sent back to El Salvador, since his life was in danger there. He has become an apprentice in a machinist program, and is married with children.

In March this year, Abrego Garcia and 200 other people were put on a plane and dropped off in El Salvador at a notorious prison, where beatings and torture were common and well-known. For two months, the Trump administration claimed they could do nothing for these prisoners. They admitted Abrego Garcia had been sent there as a criminal, but had never been convicted of a thing.

The head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, was particularly loud in calling these immigrants horrible gang members, about which there was not a single shred of proof. Then, when Abrego Garcia was brought home, he was re-arrested, and Noem said to the media he was a gang member, he was a trafficker of women, he brutalized his wife—again without any of these charges making their way through a court. Tom Homan, known as Trump’s border czar, called Abrego Garcia a child molester and terrorist, again without offering proof, as the man had not been convicted of anything.

Abrego Garcia is currently under arrest, threatened with deportation to Uganda. Unlike many other immigrants arrested, he has a lawyer and hundreds of supporters to attend rallies for him. The current administration is determined to keep him in prison and/or deport him as a warning. He has become a public figure; his story of injustice has become nationally known. Trump’s gang is determined he will not live free.

Perhaps he is proof that prosecution against immigrants can be resisted. Those who protest keep him alive and enable the fight to continue.