Salvadoran Citizen and “Maryland Man” Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia (Kaag) has become the Joan of Arc of the American links – their poster – child for the opposite campaign by President Donald Trump to maintain immigration laws. Why?
At first glance, Kaag seems like a bad choice. Two immigration rights thought it was credible that he was a member of MS-13, the mean Salvadoran gang. Indeed, when he finally claimed the protection against deportation, a decade after arrival, one of his arguments was that he feared for persecution by a rival gang.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Kaag’s wife has requested a reliable order against him for domestic violence – twice. Subsequently, in November 2022, Paragon “Maryland Dad” Kaag was caught driving too fast, without a valid driver’s license, by the State Police of Tennessee. They looked in 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 go on a field of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on 25 August 2025 in Baltimore, Maryland. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty images)
The logical conclusion was that Kaag was paid to smuggle them from the border to Maryland, where they would undoubtedly work illegally. The police let him go and cut bait. They probably knew that if they mention ice in that Biden era of open borders and massive illegal migration, nobody would come.
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Even without the criminal accusations, Kaag would hardly be a model immigrant. After a decade in the US, presumably with a few years in public schools, he cannot function in English. The regular media describe him as a construction worker, but I seriously doubt whether his lifelong contributions to federal and local taxes are near what he and his family have achieved in education, health care and other benefits.
To understand why he is defended by proponents who hold “free Kilmar” rallies with handmade posters and banners, you have to understand this: “abolition” is now the position of the American links, and the resistance to all immigration enforcement is increasingly the mainstream viewing on the democrats.
“Abolition”, for these activists, means that no illegal immigrant should even be held, let alone deported. No “process” is completed unless the alien wins.
Kaag’s case is fairly simple, although cloudy by all lawsuits.
He crossed the border illegally around 2012 and ended up in Maryland.
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In April 2019 he was arrested in the company of various members of MS-13.
Kaag was then placed in deportation procedures – because he was an illegal alien.
In October 2019, a Baltimore Immigration Judge denied Kaag’s asylum application because he had not applied within one year of arrival as our law requires. (If you are fleeing your life, this seems like a small thing to ask to prove your bona fide.)
The judge also denied his request under the treaty against torture – an orphan greeting plays that many illegal immigrants make when asylum fails.
The judge gave him ‘legal withholding of removal’, but only to El Salvador. DHS was free to send him somewhere else that would bring him. Surprise-probably a cut-and-paste error, the judge written “Guatemala” instead. That didn’t help.
The judge accepted that Kaag could cause damage because he was a member of a “specific social group” – incredible, that was the “direct family members of the Abrego family.”
Kaag appealed against the decision, but the Council of Immigration Assessment rejected it.
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In March 2025 Ice arrested him and sent him to El Salvador a few days later. The president of that country, Nayib Bukele, has crushed the gang problem and drastically reduced the murder figure by law enforcement and the establishment of a gigantic new prison for gang members.
In April the wife of Kaag filed a complaint in Maryland, Kristi call et al. V Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia et al.
In a series of decisions, the American district judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to bring him back, it insisted that every removal procedure started in her jurisdiction and that ice needed to be aware of three days before he started the removal procedure against Kaag. I don’t know where that random new requirement comes from. Xinis is deep in unknown waters.
The Supreme Court partially maintained the Xinis process decision and required the government to “facilitate” the return of Kaag and then continues its immigration process normally. The government brought him back. Kaag was then accused of alien smuggling in Tennessee, based on the arrest of November 2022, and held there.
Because President Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization to be a foreign terrorist organization, the BAR 2019 would no longer apply for sending Kaag to El Salvador. But try to send him there, would certainly get bogged down in lawsuits, so the US looks at other safe countries where it can go, such as Uganda. This is permitted under our law. Sometimes it is the only way to ensure the removal of aliens when their home countries do not take them back.
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In August, Kaag was released from prison in Tennessee and by private security – to Maryland. Who pays for that safety, and all his lawyers? The immigration activist complex of course. Kaag represents everything they stand for: endless process until the alien remains. For progressives, no one can ever be deportable, regardless of their criminal history, and regardless of the imbalance between what they take and what they give to our society and economy.
To prevent the law from being deported, his lawyers continued to pursue a lawsuit, submit a motion to reject his case and claim that the government pursues a “vengeful and selective prosecution”.
The executive power has authority in immigration cases, not federal courts. But as with so much different in our new era, activist judges go beyond the right process to find out “new process” – in fact to allow illegal alien bites of the aliens at the Apple until they win.
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Kaag’s nine lives can finally run out. But there seems to be no shortage of money and legal muscles that is willing to keep him here to keep him here. How this is playing will determine precedents and determine standards for the rest of the Trump presidency.
Either the rule of law is restored when it comes to immigration, or an alien with sufficient NGO support can remain forever, regardless of their background. Anyway, Kaag will change the game.
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