With all that has happened since January, one issue that has received less and less attention is the flow of illegal crossers over the U.S.-Mexico border. That’s because there no longer is a flow of illegal crossers over the U.S.-Mexico border. President Donald Trump stopped it in a matter of weeks. What had been a national crisis under President Joe Biden, with 10 million to 15 million immigrants entering illegally while U.S. authorities did almost nothing, was fixed quickly by the new president. Democrats, of course, were on the wrong side of the issue, so they don’t talk much about Trump’s achievements.
But now, Democrats across Washington and their allies in the media are consumed with intense emotion over another immigration-related issue: the case of an illegal migrant and possible MS-13 gang member named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump administration recently deported to his native El Salvador. The Abrego Garcia affair has anti-Trump forces almost convulsed in a mixture of rage, self-righteousness, and political opportunism.
You get the idea. Rather than go through the entire case here, for the moment, focus on a few things to know about Abrego Garcia. One of the key issues in the controversy is whether, as the Trump administration claims, Abrego Garcia was involved with the brutal MS-13 transnational gang, or whether, as the anti-Trump forces claim, he was just an innocent father who had never been involved in gang activity who was unfairly targeted by the Trump deportation machine.
Start by saying the public does not yet have a definitive answer to the gang question. However, we do know that Abrego Garcia has a habit of hanging out and being photographed by people he knows nothing about. You might see him talking to a group of men or see a picture of him with the group, but when you ask him about them, he will say he knows … nothing.
Abrego Garcia entered the United States illegally sometime in 2012, “at or near an unknown place on or about an unknown date,” and “was not then admitted or paroled after inspection by an immigration officer,” as the court documents say. In other words, he entered illegally. He ran into trouble with immigration authorities on March 28, 2019, in Maryland, when officers of the Prince George’s County Police Department approached him “because he and others were loitering outside of a Home Depot,” according to court documents. Police gang investigators took him to the station and placed Abrego Garcia and the three men he was arrested with in separate rooms. Under questioning, Abrego Garcia denied he was a gang member and said he did not know the other guys. I didn’t know who they were, and I didn’t know anything about them. He was just hanging out with them.
The government does not see it that way. Abrego Garcia was “arrested in the company of other ranking gang members,” officials said, and was “confirmed to be a ranking member of the MS-13 gang by a proven and reliable source.” That source had “verified Abrego Garcia’s gang membership, rank, and gang name,” according to an account from an immigration judge. Specifically, the government believed Abrego Garcia was affiliated with an MS-13 subgroup that was headquartered in Long Island. Authorities also believed the hoodie and Chicago Bulls hat that Abrego Garcia was wearing were consistent with MS-13 style.
Remember that at that time, Abrego Garcia was in the U.S. illegally — “an alien present in the United States without being admitted or paroled.” As such, he was subject to removal. Abrego Garcia requested a hearing before an immigration judge, who concluded that the “evidence shows that Abrego Garcia is a verified member of MS-13.” Abrego Garcia was staring deportation in the face.
Seeking a way out of his problem, Abrego Garcia asked for asylum. It was not granted. He asked for protection under the Convention Against Torture. It was not granted. Finally, he asked for something called “withholding of removal.” That meant he could be deported, just not to his home country of El Salvador, because he said he feared he would be attacked if he returned. He told officials that his mother, Cecilia, made money by making and selling pupusas out of their home and that a local gang, Barrio 18, demanded she give them money. Abrego Garcia told the immigration court that “he was threatened with death because he was Cecilia’s son and the Barrio 18 gang targeted [him] to get at the mother and her earnings from the pupusa business,” according to court papers. Abrego Garcia was granted withholding of removal, which meant the U.S. government was welcome to deport him to any country in the world, just not El Salvador.
But he wasn’t deported at all. Fast forward to March 12, 2025, when Abrego Garcia lived in Baltimore. Driving after work, he was pulled over by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who arrested him. He was allowed to call his wife, and during the call, he told her “he was being questioned about gang affiliations,” according to court papers. According to his lawyers’ account, Abrego Garcia “repeatedly informed his interviewers that he was never a gang member and had no gang affiliations. He was shown several photos where he appeared in public and asked about people in those photos, but he could not provide any information on them, as he did not know them or anything about them.”
That was the second time Abrego Garcia was asked about people he was hanging out with — in this case, photographed with — and said he had no idea who they were. Now, we do not know who the other people in the photos were. But it is reasonable to ask, and very useful to find out whether those others might have been known gang members. As the former prosecutor William Shipley, who has written about this case, said, “I’m highly confident these weren’t photos of him with some other ex-pat Salvadorans at a picnic celebrating their shared cultural heritage. And I would not be surprised if ICE was able to establish that some of the individuals in the pictures are [gang members] as previously described by the confidential source.”
What other evidence is there of Abrego Garcia’s alleged gang connection? Two documents we have not yet seen from Abrego Garcia’s earlier run-ins with authorities are something called Form I-213 and the Prince George’s County Police Department Gang Field Interview Sheet. Through his lawyers, Abrego Garcia objected to either document being admitted into evidence in his earlier immigration proceedings. It would be very good for the public to see both papers.
Now, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers are trying to defend him by saying that a bad officer had accused him. An article in the liberal New Republic claims, “The Maryland police officer who formally attested to Abrego Garcia’s supposed gang affiliation in 2019, when he was detained the first time, was subsequently suspended from the force for a serious transgression: giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker.” Assuming the report is accurate, does that mean Abrego Garcia was not in a gang? It’s a non-sequitur, but that is what Abrego Garcia’s lawyers suggest.
One could ask the same question of new reports that Jennifer Vasquez, Abrego Garcia’s wife, who has been telling the press what a wonderful husband and father he is, filed for protection from him in a domestic violence case in 2021. Make of that what you will.
So now, the question is what to do with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and what to think of Democrats and the media for making him their new cause célèbre. The Trump administration fights the first question in court with an Obama-appointed judge, Paula Xinis, in Maryland. Whatever happens in that court, the issue will ultimately end up with the Supreme Court.
As for Democrats, why would they choose this case to make a stand? The Trump administration should not have sent Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, but it admits that was a mistake. It can now, quite properly and legally, move Abrego Garcia to some other country. Indeed, in court Tuesday, a U.S. lawyer said that if Abrego Garcia somehow made his way to the U.S., “he would become subject to detention by the Department of Homeland Security. In that case, DHS would take him into custody in the United States and either remove him to a third country or terminate his withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13, a designated foreign terrorist organization, and remove him to El Salvador.”
Obviously, if the Trump administration did that, Democrats would crank up their protests even higher. But the question will remain: The party, which paid a political price for being so disastrously wrong on the border issue, is now casting its lot with an illegal immigrant credibly accused of gang membership. Is that supposed to be a cause that inspires millions of voters?
