Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported to El Salvador, on Friday expressed relief to learn he is alive after a Democratic US senator managed to meet with him.
“It was very overwhelming – the most important thing for me, my children, his mom, brothers was to see him alive, and we saw him alive” Vasquez Sura told ABC in an interview.
Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen revealed on Thursday evening that he had met with Ábrego García at the maximum security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT, where the autocratic regime holds prisoners without due process. Ábrego García was arrested by immigration agents in Maryland, where he lives and works with his family.
He had been afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador, which the Trump administration ignored last month when it flew him and more than 200 Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador without warning or a court hearing, in a move that has fallen foul of judges in the US right up to the supreme court.
Van Hollen posted a picture of himself with Ábrego García in what appeared to be a cafeteria-style setting in the hospital wing of the prison, and the senator said he would provide a full update upon his return to the US. The previous day he has failed to be given access to the prison or his constituent after flying to the Central American country pledging to try to bring him back.
Vasquez described her spouse as “a very loving husband, an amazing father” adding they were just parents “trying to live the American dream”.
The Trump administration claims Ábrego García is a member of the Salvadoran violent gang network MS-13. But his family and the head of the sheetmetal workers union that represents the trade in which he is an apprentice, have said he is not connected to a gang. He has not been charged with any crimes in the US or his native El Salvador and the government admitted in a court filing that he had been deported in error, but since has refused to work to secure his return to the US despite court orders to do so.
The US president posted on social media criticizing the senator and the press in characteristic Trump language, saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone”.
Meanwhile, Vasquez said on Friday that Garcia had been picked up by federal agents as he was pulled over while driving in Maryland. “What we thought was a regular traffic stop, turned out not to be a regular traffic stop,” she said, and reiterated denials that Garcia was a member of MS-13 or any other gang.
“He’s not,” she added.
She declined to discuss a protective order she filed against him back in 2021 over allegations of domestic violence, which the Trump administration had exposed earlier this week and she had said was a glitch in their marriage that they recovered from with help. “I’m happy he’s alive, and that’s all I can say,” she said.
Vazquez latest comments came as the Trump administration is resisting a court order to facilitate the return of Ábrego García to the US. At an extraordinary White House meeting earlier this week, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele told reporters he would not be returning the man.
In scathing court order, a US court of appeals for the fourth circuit on Thursday denied the administration’s effort to appeal an earlier order from a federal judge in Maryland requiring the government to facilitate Ábrego García’s return, and the judge issued a stark warning about US constitutional democracy, as Donald Trump continues to defy courts’ orders on numerous fronts.
The court said the administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free the father from the prison and return him “should be shocking” to the public.
The blistering order further ratcheted up the escalating conflict between the US government’s co-equal executive and judicial branches.
Judge James Wilkinson said: “It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter, but in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”
“Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done,” he added.
“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not,” the panel said in its decision. “Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order.”
The judges said the executive branch “may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph”.
They warned that the standoff between the executive and judicial branches of government “is a losing proposition all around”.
“The judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions,” the judges said.
Meanwhile, a federal judge on Friday morning barred the Trump administration from implementing a new policy allowing it to rapidly deport hundreds if not thousands of migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show they fear being persecuted, tortured or killed there.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
