WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old apprentice sheet metal worker and member of the SMART union has been in prison in El Salvador for over 75 days, first in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) and now in the Centro Industrial prison in Santa Ana. The director and warden of this prison, Samuel Díaz, told NBC News, “No gang members work here.”
Abrego Garcia’s family and union, the immigration rights group CASA de Maryland, politicians and others are waging a political and legal fight to win his return to the U.S. There are big stakes for the working class in this fight, and it has won broad support.
An attempt to visit Abrego Garcia in El Salvador by his attorney, Democratic Maryland Congressman Glenn Ivey and Jaime Contreras, the head of the Baltimore-Washington district of SEIU 32BJ, was turned back by officials at Santa Ana May 26. This was despite the fact the delegation had consulted with both Salvadoran and U.S. authorities before making the trip.
“To refuse to give a chance to have a meeting with my constituent, even in a minimum security prison,” Ivey told the press, “makes absolutely no sense.”
It’s been quite a while since anyone in the U.S. has been able to talk to Abrego Garcia, to be assured he is healthy. Ivey was carrying a personal message to him from his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura.
The Ivey-union trip was vilified by the Department of Homeland Security, part of an ongoing smear campaign by the U.S. government.
“Congressman, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a confirmed MS-13 gang member, wife beater, human trafficker, and illegal alien from El Salvador — not your constituent,” DHS posted on “X”.
“He was not wrongly deported,” White House deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson posted. “And the American people are safer because he’s out of our country.”
These smears are either false or misconstrued. In fact, Abrego Garcia had been barred from deportation by an immigration court in 2019 for legitimate fear of being subjected to violence if he returned to El Salvador. He has never been convicted of any crime. The main “proof” the administration presents that he’s a gang member is a doctored photograph of tattoos on his hand to make it look like it says MS-13.
And the Department of Homeland Security has admitted he was deported as the result of an “administrative error.”
“Officials floated false claims of gang affiliation and fabricated a narrative to justify keeping Kilmar detained and separated from his wife, his community, and his home,” explains Cathyrn Jackson of CASA de Maryland.
The Washington Post ran a feature article, “As a boy in El Salvador, Abrego Garcia feared gangs, avoided recruitment,” describing how he grew up in Los Nogales, a workers’ district in San Salvador, where gangs became part of daily life. But according to his classmates and teachers at the school the paper interviewed, he wasn’t part of gangs and sought to keep away from them. He fled El Salvador at age 16 after threats to his family and himself. His mother and older brother also fled after gang-related death threats.
A central question in Abrego Garcia’s case, and thousands of other deportations today, is the constitutional right to due process, including for immigrants. Many workers, like Abrego Garcia, face being swept up in lightning-fast deportations, with no chance to get a lawyer and defend themselves. In one case, several men in Boston were taken in and told at 5:45 p.m. that they were to be put on a flight for South Sudan the next morning.
Efforts to defend due process and other rights fought for and won by the U.S. working class are a political and union question that needs to be discussed and defended.