SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador ― The tiny neighborhood of Los Nogales, with its pinkish-red bougainvilleas and a small knot of streets rising above El Salvador’s capital, seems cut off from the sprawling city below.
Senda 3, a cul-de-sac at the heart of the neighborhood, dead-ends into bushes and trees. Houses are jammed together. Neighbors walk a few steps to makeshift tiendas, or shops, nestled inside front rooms behind plastic sheeting, or metal bars, or both.
This is the street where Kilmar Abrego Garcia spent his early years. And the street he fled to come to America.
He was a teenager when he left to build a new life in a new country. He’s 29 now and back in El Salvador, this time in prison, a father of three caught in a standoff among President Donald Trump, the courts, some members of Congress and the Salvadoran government.
Abrego Garcia’s deportation – and the Trump administration’s refusal to return him to the United States, even though it admits he was sent back to El Salvador by mistake – has made him the most high-profile target of Trump’s campaign to expel millions of migrants who entered the United States illegally.
The Justice Department insists Abrego Garcia is a member of a dangerous criminal gang. Abrego Garcia, who had lived in Maryland for years before he was deported, insists he is not.
Regardless of who is right, Abrego Garcia’s story begins here, in Los Nogales, on Senda 3.
The small terrace house he lived in with his parents and two siblings is still standing. His mother, Cecilia, referred to affectionately as “Cece” by old friends, made pupusas there with the help of her three young children every Friday, Saturday and Sunday and sold them to neighbors.
A woman named Rocio, who is in her 30s and lives just two doors down, proudly showed off photos of Abrego Garcia, his sister and his older brother Cesar attending a birthday party in her home.
At the time, San Salvador was the domain of violent gangs. Two rival gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, or the 18th Street gang, fought over turf block by block, running the Central American country’s murder rate in 2012 up among the highest in the world at 41 per 100,000 people, according to the United Nations.
A view of Los Nogales, the neighborhood in El Salvador where Kilmar Abrego Garcia grew up before moving to the United States. The father of three was deported from Maryland by the Trump administration and sent back to El Salvador.
Los Nogales was neutral ground.
“There was never trouble with gangs here,” said a man who would only give his name as Jorge. “I’ve lived here for 20 years and never had a problem.”
Jorge’s sentiments were echoed by almost a dozen of Abrego Garcia’s close neighbors, friends and neighborhood acquaintances interviewed by USA TODAY.
The paper is identifying Jorge and other locals only by their first names because they fear reprisals from El Salvador’s increasingly authoritarian government.
Members of Abrego Garcia’s family denied multiple USA TODAY interview requests to speak about his early years in El Salvador and his home life.
But when Abrego Garcia lived on Senda 3, a five-minute walk to the calle principal would land him in gang territory.
Los Nogales was surrounded on all sides by “troubled” neighborhoods where bandidos run rampant, a resident named Fredy said.
The burgeoning pupuseria business run by Cece, Abrego Garcia’s mother, attracted the greed of Barrio 18 members. They demanded monthly protection money from the family and threatened to enlist Abrego Garcia in the gang as payment or even to stalk, kidnap and kill him, according to court records entered by his attorneys.
A neighbor identified as “Rocio” points at a childhood photograph of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
A short distance from where Cece once rolled out her pupusas sits the local watering hole, run by a husband and wife.
On an afternoon in mid-April, beer-swilling revelers crowded inside and listened to rancheras and watched fútbol. Waiters carried plates of seafood and fried potatoes from the kitchen to the simple wooden tables. Patrons covered the mouths of their beer bottles with paper napkins against the flies buzzing around, attracted by a free lunch, or drink.
Like the flies, gangsters from the surrounding barrios historically swarmed around local businesses that made money in Los Nogales – even if they’re tucked away and shut behind metal bars and barbed wire.
A van sits on the streets of Los Nogales, the neighborhood in San Salvador, El Salvador, where Kilmar Abrego Garcia grew up.
Insects and extortionists always find their way in, said Edward, the bar’s current owner.
The bar’s previous owners had to sell because the payments to Barrio 18 were too burdensome, Edward said. His wife pointed to where a cluster of popular restaurants once sat. They, too, closed because of financial pressure from the bandidos.
Whether Abrego Garcia’s family was the victim of Barrio 18, the neighbors hadn’t heard. But they did know the family had fallen on hard times.
“The bank was foreclosing on their house, that’s why they had to sell up and leave,” Fredy said. “They moved nearby to another house.”
Cece long planned for her sons to leave El Salvador and the dangers lurking there, Los Nogales residents said.
Cesar, the oldest boy, went first. He left for the United States. Abrego Garcia soon followed. He was just 16.
For days, he walked north, crossing the Rio Grande. He entered the United States illegally near McAllen, Texas, around March 12, 2012.
His journey, however, was far from over.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia grew up in San Salvador, El Salvador, before fleeing to the United States
A Home Depot in Maryland
In the suburb of Hyattsville, Maryland, Home Depot is where homeowners shop for supplies for do-it-yourself repairs and where construction crews come for materials.
It’s also where migrants look for day jobs.
Groups of men from Latin American countries wait in the parking lot. Some help customers carry supplies in exchange for a cash tip or, if they are lucky, a day gig. A woman sells tamales out of the back of a van while a small boy plays in the back.
It was here that Abrego Garcia’s new life started to unravel.
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He had made his way to Maryland. His older brother, Cesar, was living there and had become a U.S. citizen.
In 2016, Abrego Garcia met the woman who would become his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a Salvadoran American. Around the same age, they connected through her coworker, Abrego Garcia’s best friend.
The small neighborhood of Los Nogales in San Salvador, El Salvador
There was an instant spark. He liked that she was a strong woman.
“It would amaze him that no matter what life put me through, I would face it,” she said in a phone interview with USA TODAY in early April.
They moved in together two years later. Vasquez Sura had two children from a previous relationship, a daughter who has epilepsy and a son with autism. The girl wanted to be a makeup artist and her brother, a soccer player. Abrego Garcia raised the two children as his own. To them, she said, he’s their dad.
The children’s biological father, Edwin Ramos, filed a custody claim against Vasquez Sura in 2018 allegeding she lived with a gang member. The document circulated as more evidence of Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 affiliation, but the case was quickly dismissed, according to court records.
A year later, Ramos was charged and convicted of second-degree rape and remains incarcerated in Maryland.
Abrego Garcia found work as an HVAC installer and was a member of CASA, a nonprofit that operates day worker centers in Maryland. The couple learned they were expecting a son, who they’d name Kilmar Jr.
They had what seemed like a good life, until police spotted him in the Home Depot parking lot.
On March 28, 2019, Abrego Garcia drove to the Hyattsville store on East-West Highway, about eight miles north of the U.S. Capitol. He was looking for construction work, his wife would later say in court documents.
Records released by Hyattsville, Maryland, and Prince George’s County police say he was loitering. He was standing in the parking lot with three other men, two of whom he recognized. The four were chatting to pass the time, his lawyers said.
Abrego Garcia was taken in for questioning. One of the men he had been talking to, Christhyan Hernandez-Romero, had an extensive rap sheet that included assault, burglary and concealing a weapon. He was known to Hyattsville police as an MS-13 gang member.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is seen in a handout image
Prince George’s police detective Ivan Mendez, the investigating officer, suspected Abrego Garcia was also part of the gang. He reached that conclusion, he wrote in his police report, based on three things: Abrego Garcia was sporting a Chicago Bulls hat, which authorities say is worn by active MS-13 members. He had on a dark-hooded sweatshirt, which authorities also said was associated with or consistent with an MS-13 slogan. And a confidential informant had identified him as a member of MS-13.
Abrego Garcia denied he was a member of MS-13 or any gang.
Days later, the police detective’s credibility would come under scrutiny. The force accused him of sharing confidential information about an ongoing investigation with a sex worker. He was later fired and placed on the county district attorney’s do-not-call list of unreliable sources.
Hyattsville police, meanwhile, say records of their encounter with Abrego Garcia made no connection to MS-13. He had two vials of marijuana, which they seized. No charges were filed against him.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were called in because police suspected Abrego Garcia was an undocumented immigrant. He was assigned an Alien Registration Number, or A-number. The federal government could now keep tabs on him.
Based on the conclusions of the now-disgraced Prince George’s detective, ICE wrote in Abrego Garcia’s file: “Subject has been identified as a Member/Active of M.S.13.”
At a hearing before an immigration judge that April, Abrego Garcia denied that he was a gang member, insisting he wasn’t a risk to the community. The judge declined to issue him a bond, citing the gang report filed by Mendez and the tip from the confidential informant.
Abrego Garcia remained in jail, awaiting possible deportation.
Downtown San Salvador, El Salvador
That June, Abrego Garcia and a seven-months-pregnant Vasquez Sura married at the Howard Detention Center in Jessup, Maryland, where he was being held. Their son, Kilmar Jr. was born in August. The child has microtia, a congenital malformation of the ear, is intellectually disabled with a speech disorder and has been diagnosed with autism.
Abrego Garcia asked the courts for a protective order preventing his deportation to El Salvador, where he feared gangs threatened his life. The judge granted the order on Oct. 10. Abrego Garcia could still be expelled from the United States – he just couldn’t be returned to El Salvador.
Abrego Garcia was released from custody after six months in detention, but was required to check in with ICE yearly.
For six years, records show, he did.
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A house in suburbia
The tree-lined street where Abrego Gracia and his growing family settled sits in a quiet neighborhood. Pink and white blossoms fall from branches and decorate the front lawns of small, brick houses. In one yard, a Mexican flag flutters in a mild breeze.
Near the bottom of a slight hill is the white-brick house that Abrego-Garcia called home. A child’s scooter and a toy lawn mower rest on the grassy lawn. Parked in the driveway is a white pickup, a boat hitched to its rear.
The suburb of Beltsville, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington, is where Abrego Garcia was living the American dream.
He’d found work as a union sheet metal apprentice. He took worker safety training and classes at the University of Maryland. He was in the first year of a five-year apprenticeship and working toward a union “pink card” that would mean higher pay and benefits.
“He was on track, really, to the middle class,” said Tom Killeen, political director for the sheet metal workers Maryland-based Local 100.
But home life was turbulent.
Abrego Garcia had grown “more reserved” after his release from detention and now had “a sadness” about him that his wife hadn’t seen prior to his time in ICE custody, she said in court records.
In 2020, Vasquez Sura petitioned a court for a domestic protection order against her husband. One altercation, she said, resulted in police responding to their home after he slapped and threatened her.
“Like at 3:00 in the morning, he would just wake up and, like, hit me,” she told a judge in a recording obtained by USA TODAY. Then before her daughter’s birthday party, “he slapped me three times…then last week my sister called the police because he hit me in front of my sister.”
In 2021, Vasquez Sura petitioned for a protection order a second time, citing instances of violence in 2019, 2020 and 2021. Abrego Garcia “punched and scratched” her, ripped off her shirt and grabbed and bruised her, according to her testimony to a judge.
The case was closed after a month, according to Prince George’s County records.
Vasquez Sura said in a statement to USA TODAY that neither she nor her husband was in a good place when she filed for the protective orders.
“My husband was traumatized from the time he spent in ICE detention, and we were in the throes of COVID,” she said. “Like many couples, we were caring for our children with barely enough to get by. All of those factors contributed to the actions, which caused me to seek the protective order.”
In an earlier statement released April 17, she also told USA TODAY she sought the 2021 order out of precaution because she had experienced domestic violence in a past relationship.
Then, in March 2025, ICE re-entered their lives.
Abrego Garcia was working at a job site in Baltimore, installing HVAC ducts on a new University of Maryland hospital building. He finished his shift on Wednesday afternoon, March 12, and then picked up his 5-year-old at the home of Cece, who had followed her sons to the United States. With his own son in the back seat, Abrego Garcia was on his way home when he phoned his wife to say he was being pulled over for what he thought was a routine traffic stop.
It wasn’t. It was ICE.
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Abrego Garcia wasn’t confident speaking English, so Vasquez Sura told him to put her on speakerphone while he talked with the officers, she said in a court filing. She could overhear the conversation as an agent told her husband to turn off the car and get out. Abrego Garcia explained to the officer, in English, that his son with special needs was in the back seat. Vasquez Sura heard the officer take his phone and hang up.Minutes later, she got another call, this time from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The caller gave her 10 minutes to get to the scene and pick up her son or child protective services would be contacted. When she got there, Abrego Garcia was on the curb and in handcuffs, crying, she said.
Officers said they were taking him in. His immigration status had changed, the agents informed him.
“I told him he would come back home,” Vasquez Sura said, “because he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, speaks at a news conference in Washington. Vasquez Sura’s husband was wrongly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration
Abrego Garcia was detained, sent to Baltimore and transferred to a Texas detention center. There, he was handcuffed, shackled and, three days later, put on a plane with other detainees. None of them had any idea where they were going. They were being sent to El Salvador, despite the protective order barring Abrego Garcia’s return to his homeland.
In El Salvador, he and others expelled by the Trump administration were placed in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a notorious prison criticized for its harsh and dangerous conditions and its rough treatment of prisoners.
Vasquez Sura and their 5-year-old sued the federal government, demanding that Abrego Garcia be returned home. Days later, government attorneys admitted in court records that he had been deported by mistake – an “administrative error” was the official explanation – but said they had no authority to return him because he was now in a foreign country.
A federal judge in Maryland, Paula Xinis, disagreed and ruled on April 4 that the Trump administration had committed an “illegal act” by deporting him. Xinis directed the U.S. government to “facilitate” his return. In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court also demanded the administration start the process of bringing Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
The Trump administration, however, dug in.
Trump called Abrego Garcia a foreign terrorist. A White House spokesman labeled him a “wife beater,” citing Vasquez Sura’s four-year-old request for a temporary protective order. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, described him as a “human smuggler.”
The administration released records from a traffic stop in an effort to back up its claims. The Tennessee Highway Patrol had pulled Abrego Garcia over on Interstate 40 in December 2022. He was driving with eight passengers and no luggage. Local authorities suspected he was smuggling people north from Texas to Maryland, the Department of Homeland Security said. But the state police officer who pulled him over released him without charges or even writing a ticket.
Abrego Garcia’s wife said in a statement that he worked in construction and sometimes transported groups of workers between job sites, which could explain why there were others in the vehicle.
In search of Abrego Garcia
El Salvador’s CECOT prison is a rambling complex spread across 57 acres southeast of San Salvador. Built in 2022, the maximum-security facility is surrounded by two sets of walls. Its prisoners, who include gang members, are often called the worst of the worst.
Abrego Garcia had last been seen frog-walking through the prison.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, right, was stopped by armed guards at a military checkpoint in El Salvador while attempting to see Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador.
Vasquez Sura, his wife, spotted him in news photos. She recognized the two scars on his now-shaved head and the tattoos on his knuckles. From the Oval Office, Trump has shown reporters a photo of the tattoos as proof that Abrego Garcia is a gang member.
By now, it had been a month since he was last sighted. Questions about Abrego Garcia’s location and status – including those ordered by the federal judge overseeing the case – remained unanswered.
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, wanted to know if his constituent was safe, healthy and, above all, alive. So he headed to the Central American country to check on Abrego Garcia himself.
The two-day trip had proved fruitless: Salvadoran Vice President Félix Ulloa had denied the senator’s request to enter CECOT. Van Hollen’s last-minute push to drive to the prison and demand a meeting was thwarted by a military checkpoint. Less than two miles away, armed military personnel pulled over his small convoy of vehicles.
“He is totally beyond reach,” Van Hollen said at the side of the road.
Van Hollen and his team headed back to their hotel. In a few hours, they were to fly back to the United States. The senator still didn’t know if Abrego Garcia was even breathing.
Then, a phone call from the U.S. embassy: Would he be willing to meet with Abrego Garcia at his hotel that afternoon?
They negotiated the optics. The Salvadoran government wanted the meeting to take place next to the pool in the hotel’s lush gardens. Van Hollen said no and suggested the hotel restaurant instead. Wait there, he was instructed.
Turned away: Van Hollen stopped at military checkpoint on way to Salvadoran prison
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, left, a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador, meets with Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen at a hotel in San Salvador.
Fans turned in the restaurant’s cream-colored ceiling. Waiters swished from table to table, politely taking orders. Children played nearby as an afternoon breeze combed through the palm trees.
Abrego Garcia emerged, escorted by at least five officials. Dressed casually in jeans, a plaid button-down shirt and a Kansas City Chiefs baseball cap, he was not handcuffed.
The two men spoke alone for a few minutes, sipping coffee and water as Abrego Garcia told of his ordeal. They sat in wicker chairs at a four-top wooden table set with white china, glasses and silverware.
‘Prayers have been answered’: Sen. Chris Van Hollen meets with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongly deported to El Salvador
“He spoke of the trauma he had experienced, both with being abducted and then, when they got to Texas, being shackled, handcuffed, and put on a plane with no way to see out of the windows,” Van Hollen told USA TODAY.
Abrego Garcia told the senator he had been placed into a cell with 25 people at CECOT. He said he was fearful of the prisoners in other cells who called out to him. But a few days earlier he had been moved out to a lower-security prison, Centro Industrial in Santa Ana, with better conditions.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Maryland, hugs Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, after returning from El Salvador. Van Hollen met with Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration.
When they finished, Van Hollen escorted Abrego Garcia to the front of the hotel lobby. They walked over the highly polished marble tiles and past wooden furniture. On the walls were framed photographs of visiting heads of state, including several U.S. presidents.
Van Hollen watched as officers whisked Abrego Garcia from the Sheraton Presidente. Avenida de la Revolución was the last place he was seen.
His steps receding, he vanished again.
National correspondent Will Carless anchored this story from El Salvador. Eduardo Cuevas and Michael Collins reported from Maryland. Investigations reporter and records expert Nick Penzenstadler dug through court documents and police reports.
Contributing: Cybele Mayes-Osterman in Washington and Julia Gavarrete in San Salvador, El Salvador.
Editing: Romina Ruiz-Goiriena and Doug Caruso
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Abrego Garcia’s streets defined man at center of immigration debate