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Salvadoran citizen and “Maryland man”KilmarArmandoAbregoGarcia(KAAG) has become the Joan of Arc of the American left – their poster child for opposing President Donald Trump’s campaign of enforcing immigration laws. Why?
At first glance, KAAG seems a lousy pick. Two immigration judges found it credible that he was a member of MS-13, the vicious Salvadoran gang. Indeed, when he finally got around to claiming protection against deportation, a decade after arriving,one of his arguments was that he feared persecution by a rival gang.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, KAAG’s wifefiled fora restraining order against him for domestic violence – twice. Then in November 2022, paragon “Maryland Dad” KAAG was caught speeding, without a valid driver’s license, by Tennessee state police. They looked inside his van, with tinted windows, and saw what they thought were nine illegal alien men.
Surrounded by reporters, Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura enter a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office on Aug. 25, 2025 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The logical inference was that KAAG was being paid to smuggle them from the border to Maryland, where they’d no doubt work illegally. The cops let him go and cut bait. They probably knew that if they called ICE in that Biden era of open borders and mass illegal migration, noone would come.
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Even without the criminal allegations, KAAG would hardly be a model immigrant. After a decade in the U.S., presumably with several years in public schools, he can’t function in English. The mainstream media describes him as a construction worker, yet I seriously doubt if his lifetime contributions to federal and local taxes are anywhere near what he and his family took out in education, healthcare and other benefits.
To understand why he’s championed by advocates who hold “FreeKilmar” rallies with handmade posters and banners, you have to grasp this: “abolition” is now the position of the American left, and opposing all immigration enforcement is increasingly the mainstream view among Democrats.
“Abolition,” for these activists, means that no illegal immigrant should even be detained, let alone deported. No “process” is complete unless the alien wins.
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KAAG’s case is pretty simple, though clouded by all the litigation.
He crossed the border illegally around 2012, ending up in Maryland.
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In April 2019, he was arrested while in the company of several members of MS-13.
KAAG was then put into deportation proceedings – because he was an illegal alien.
In October 2019, a Baltimore immigration judge denied KAAG’s asylum application, because he had not applied within a year of arrival as our law requires. (If you are fleeing for your life, this seems a small thing to ask to prove your bona fides.)
The judge also denied his application under the Convention Against Torture – a Hail Mary play many illegal immigrants make when asylum fails.
The judge did grant him “statutory withholding of removal,” butonly to El Salvador. DHS was free to send him anywhere else that would take him. Mistakenly – probably a cut-and-paste error – the judge wrote “Guatemala” instead. That didn’t help.
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The judge accepted that KAAG could be harmed because he was a member of a “particular social group” – incredibly, that was the “immediate family members of theAbregofamily.”
KAAG appealed the decision, but the Board of Immigration Appeals dismissedit.
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In March 2025, ICE arrested him and a few days later sent him to El Salvador. That country’s president, Nayib Bukele, has crushed the gang problem and drastically lowered the murder rate through law enforcement and the creation of a giant new prison for gang members.
In April, KAAG’s wife filed acomplaintin Maryland,Kristi Noem et al. vKilmarArmandoAbregoGarciaet al.
In a series of decisions, Baltimore U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring him back, insisted that any removal proceedings begin in her jurisdiction, and required ICE to provide three days’ notice before starting removal proceedings against KAAG. Where that arbitrary new requirement comes from, I don’t know. Xinis is deep in uncharted waters.
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The Supreme Court partially upheld Xinis’ process decision and required the government to “facilitate” KAAG’s return and then continue his immigration process normally. The government brought him back. KAAG was then charged with alien smuggling in Tennessee, basedonthe November 2022 arrest, and detained there.
Because President Trump has declared MS-13 a foreign terrorist organization, the 2019 baronsending KAAG to El Salvador would no longer apply. But trying to send him there would surely get bogged down in lawsuits, so the U.S. is looking at other safe countries where he can go, such as Uganda. This is permissible under our law. Sometimes, it is theonly way to ensure the removal of aliens when their home countries won’t take them back.
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In August, KAAG was released from jail in Tennessee and driven – by private security – to Maryland. Who is paying for that security, and all his lawyers? The immigration-activist complex, of course. KAAG represents everything they stand for: endless process until the alien gets to stay. For progressives, noone is ever deportable, whatever their criminal history, and whatever the imbalance between what they take and what they give to our society and economy.
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To prevent the law taking its course and KAAG being expelled, his lawyers continued pursuing litigation, filing amotion to dismisshis case, and alleging that the government is pursuing a “vindictive and selective prosecution.”
The executive branch has authority in immigration cases, not federal courts. But as with so much else in our novel era, activist judges are going beyond mere due process to invent “new process” – in effect, to allow illegal aliens unlimited bites at the apple until they win.
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KAAG’s nine lives may finally run out. But there seems to be no shortage of money and legal muscle that the “abolitionist” lobby is willing to throw at keeping him here. How this plays out will set precedents, and establish norms, for the rest of the Trump presidency.
Either the rule of law is re-established when it comes to immigration, or any alien with sufficient NGO support can remain forever, whatever their background. Either way, KAAG will change the game.
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Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center and author of “The Ten Woke Commandments (You Must Not Obey)” from Academica Books.