The wife of a Salvadoran man Donald Trump’s administration admits was mistakenly deported to that country’s notorious prison says she is “very scared” for her husband’s safety.
“I’ve seen news of that prison, and I know they take criminals there. And my husband’s not a criminal,” Jennifer Vasquez Sura told CBS News.
Her husband Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador on March 15, joining dozens of mostly Venezuelan immigrants on removal flights after Donald Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members.
Two of the planes were sent to El Salvador under that wartime authority, and a third plane was supposed to only be carrying immigrants with court orders for their removal. Abrego Garcia was on that plane — something administration officials have called an “oversight.”
In 2019, a judge had blocked Abrego Garcia’s removal after credible testimony that he fears violence and death in his home country, which he fled in 2011 when he was 16 years old. Under that order, he is allowed to remain in the United States legally, and must attend regular check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His most recent appearance was in January, according to court documents.
He has no criminal record in either the United States or El Salvador, according to his attorney. He has been living in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, both U.S. citizens, and helping raise two children from a previous relationship.
Their five-year-old son is autistic and nonverbal.
Abrego Garcia was working five days a week as a sheet metal worker while also attending college classes, Sura told CBS News.
On March 12, three days before he was sent to El Salvador’s prison, ICE officials told her that his legal status “changed” and that he would be fingerprinted and detained, she said.
After he was shuffled around to different detention centers, he told her that if she didn’t receive another call from him, she should assume he had been deported.
“He never called,” she told CBS News. “I waited and waited. He never made that call.”
She later identified him in a photograph from inside El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center shared by the Salvadoran government; masked officers were filmed dragging men in shackles into the prison.
“When I saw it, I immediately broke down ‘cause I knew it was him,” she said. “I was scared for his life.”
Following news of the government’s admission in court filings, Vice President JD Vance falsely labeled Abrego Garcia a “convicted gang member.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted there was a “clerical error” in his case, but claimed, without providing evidence, that Garcia was a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and “involved in human trafficking.”
“He’s not a criminal,” Sura told CBS News. “My husband is an amazing person. An amazing father.”
Despite the government’s admission of an error, the Trump administration is “shockingly” not even trying to get him back, according to Abrego Garcia’s attorney.
“This would be a very different case if [the administration] came before the court hat in hand, confessing error and assuring the court that remedial steps were underway, and arguing that the court should not short-circuit measures that were already in process,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote in court filings on Wednesday.
“Instead, Defendants have already washed their hands of Plaintiff, of his U.S.-citizen wife, of his autistic nonverbal five-year-old U.S.-citizen child. Defendants’ proposed resolution of this state of affairs, which they caused either intentionally or at best recklessly, is nothing at all,” he said.
If he has no recourse, then court orders intended to protect him and immigrants like him are meaningless, and “the government can deport whomever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done,” according to Sandoval-Moshenberg.
He is calling on a judge to order the Trump administration to request his return from the government of El Salvador, and at least “ask them nicely to please give him back to us,” Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote.
“It is inexplicable” that the administration has not already tried, he said.
Judge Paula Xinis is scheduled to hold a hearing in the case on April 4.
Meanwhile, a separate federal judge has temporarily blocked the administration from performing any other removal flights under the Alien Enemies Act, a block that was upheld by appellate court judges last week. The administration is now asking the Supreme Court to intervene and overturn the order.
District Judge James Boasberg is considering whether to hold government officials in contempt after defying his court orders to stop the flights from happening in the first place. A hearing in that case is set for April 3.
