Abrego
Based on infuriatingly true and ongoing events...
The Calm Before
He didn’t speak. Not with words. But Kilmar was a dutiful father, well-versed in his boy’s autism and knew what his son meant when he pressed his hand against the back of the seat, or when he reached for the rubber dinosaur in the glovebox. When he leaned his head against the window and made that low hum in his throat, Kilmar knew he was calm.
The smell of a fart wafted in from the back seat. “¡Aye, Hijo!” exclaimed Kilmar, waving his hand in front of his face like a fan. ¡Qué Fuchi!”
He opened the window to admit some fresh air and muttered under his breath.
“Good one, son…”
Sometimes, if the light was just right during a car ride, the boy would flap his hands like wings—small bursts of joy caught between shadows and telephone wires. This was one of those days.
Hyattsville, Maryland buzzed around them—post-school traffic, kids on bikes, the same corner vendor pushing tamales from a cooler with duct tape down the sides. The same shortcut past the laundromat and the tire shop and the field with the broken fence. The boy knew the route by feel. He rocked ever so slightly in his seat as they turned the corner.
“Almost home,” Kilmar said, softly. More for himself than for the boy.
The booster seat creaked as the boy adjusted. He had the dinosaur again—his comfort object—and was pressing it to his cheek, testing the rubbery give of its tail. The toy didn’t make noise, which was good. Loud sounds made him fold inward. Unfamiliar voices too.
But the car? The car was safe. The car was ritual.
Kilmar reached one hand back at the red light. The boy touched it immediately—his small palm to Kilmar’s fingers. Just for a moment. Just long enough.
That was how he said: I know you. I trust you. I’m okay.
The light turned green.
Kilmar smiled and moved forward.
He never saw the SUV until it pulled across the intersection and stopped sideways, blocking both lanes.
Unmarked. Tinted.
And then the doors opened.
The Arrest
Kilmar didn’t panic at first. Not when the SUV stopped sideways in front of him. Not even when the back doors opened and two men stepped out, fast and heavy, black windbreakers flashing letters he didn’t want to see.
ICE.
At first, he just thought: There must be a mistake.
Then: They must be here for someone else.
Then: Not here. Not now. Not with my son in the car.
The boy shifted in the booster seat, the sudden stop breaking his rhythm. He tapped his hand on the window once. Then twice. Then stopped. His mouth curled downward—not confused, not crying. Just undone.
Kilmar’s heart beat hard in his ears.
The agents split—one to each side of the car. No lights. No sirens. Just a voice barking over the hood of the car.
“Turn off the engine and put your hands where I can see them!”
Kilmar did.
“Step out of the vehicle.”
“My son is—he’s disabled,” Kilmar said. “He’s five. He doesn’t understand—”
“Now!”
“I have a stay. I have legal protection. Please—” He reached with two fingers toward the glove compartment where the paperwork was kept—his binder, neatly labeled, always ready in case—
“Keep your hands on the wheel!”
The boy was starting to rock now. Slight at first. Then faster. His hand shot to his ears. The rubber dinosaur dropped to the floor with a muffled clunk. He made a soft, keening noise, not loud but rising, like a kettle pushed just past boil.
Kilmar turned in his seat. “Shh, it’s okay, mijo. Estoy aquí. Papá’s here. Just a moment.”
One of the agents yanked open the driver’s door.
“Out of the car.”
“Please, just let me—let me calm him, let me—”
“You’re under arrest. Do not resist.”
They grabbed him by the arms and pulled.
The boy shrieked. A sharp, animal sound. Hands flailing now, desperate for contact, but strapped in too tight to reach anything but air.
“Let me say goodbye—please, please, he doesn’t understand—he’ll think I left him—”
The agents moved fast, practiced. One dragged Kilmar toward the waiting SUV. The other shut the back door behind them, cutting the boy off from view. His cries stopped with the slam, not because he was soothed—but because that’s what he did when the world overwhelmed him.
He shut down.
Kilmar twisted his neck, trying to see through the tinted window. “Tell my wife! Call Jennifer—please—she’ll come get him—don’t leave him alone—he’s just a baby!”
No answer.
His legs gave out as they shoved him into the SUV.
The car door closed with a final click.
The boy was alone.
Why He Came
They came at night.
The men weren’t in uniform, but that didn’t matter. Everyone in Usulután knew who they were. MS-13 didn’t need logos or badges. Just tattoos and machetes and the permission that silence gives.
They dragged his older brother out of the house. Said he’d been talking to the police. Said he was soft. Said he didn’t show proper respect. No trial. No questions. Just fists. Boots. Laughter.
Kilmar saw it all from the back room, crouched behind a wood-slatted door. He didn’t scream. Didn’t breathe. Just watched the skin split open across his brother’s face and stayed still enough to become furniture.
When the men left, they didn’t close the door. They wanted someone to find the body.
It was his mother who did.
She wailed so loud it split the sky. The kind of sound no god answers.
The neighbors buried his brother the next morning in a borrowed grave. Two men from church dug it by hand behind the mango grove. Kilmar’s uncle didn’t wait for the dirt to settle.
“You leave tonight,” he said.
Kilmar blinked. “I can’t leave Mamá alone.”
“You’ll die here.”
“I have nothing.”
“You have a chance.”
They packed what they could into a drawstring backpack—an extra shirt, his school ID, and twenty-eight American dollars his uncle had been hiding in a can of beans. That night, he crossed into Guatemala in the back of a flatbed truck filled with onions.
In Mexico, he was robbed by police outside Villahermosa. He walked for a day with no shoes, bleeding through his socks. Slept in drainage tunnels, under bridges. Hitchhiked when he could. Walked when he couldn’t. On the road to Reynosa, he saw another boy—maybe fourteen—get taken by a group of men in a pickup. No one stopped them.
He crossed the Rio Grande under moonlight, water up to his chin, backpack tied around his neck. His legs cramped halfway through. He nearly drowned before a branch snagged his shirt near the bank.
He turned himself in at the first Border Patrol station he saw. He applied for Asylum.
They put him in a freezing cell and gave him a foil blanket.
He didn’t complain.
He was alive.
Why He Stayed
The first time Kilmar saw snow, he was standing outside a grocery store in Takoma Park, holding a bag of oranges.
He hadn’t known it was coming. One flake, then another—landing soft on the sleeve of his borrowed jacket. He looked up, stunned. The air felt clean. Cold. Like something had been wiped away.
He laughed out loud, just once.
The old man behind him scowled and muttered, “It’s just snow.”
But to Kilmar, it wasn’t. It was proof. Of what, he didn’t yet know. Only that he was still here. That his life might grow new things.
He stayed with cousins for a while. Worked odd jobs—roofing in the summer, shoveling snow in the winter, scrubbing grease from behind restaurant fryers. Quiet work. Hard work. The kind that leaves your hands cracked and your body humming when you lie down at night.
Eventually, he moved to Maryland and met Jennifer—sharp-eyed, faster-talking than he was used to, but kind in a way that didn’t need words. She worked at the front desk of a pediatric clinic. They married two years later.
Three children followed. Two were born with challenges—one with developmental delays, and the youngest, deaf and on the spectrum. Kilmar never once saw those things as burdens. His world, after everything, had narrowed into something clear and sacred:
Keep them safe. Be what he never had.
He became a union apprentice in sheet metal, getting up before dawn to ride the Metro to job sites. On weekends, he made pancakes. He changed diapers. He memorized routines, managed meltdowns, sat through IEP meetings and therapies and more appointments than he could count.
He never raised his voice. Not once.
And always, quietly, he checked the mail—watching for updates from USCIS, printing every receipt, filing every motion. He attended every hearing.
In 2019, the moment came: an immigration judge reviewed his file and said the words that should have changed everything.
“Withholding of removal granted.”
The judge found that returning him to El Salvador would more likely than not result in death or persecution. Kilmar had met the legal threshold. He could not be deported.
He was not given a green card. But he was allowed to remain.
Legally. Peacefully. Permanently.
He smiled all the way home that day.
Jennifer met him at the door. He pulled her into a hug and whispered, “We can finally breathe.”
And for five years—they did.
Until the breath was stolen back.
The Deportation
The room smelled like bleach and rubber gloves.
Kilmar sat on a hard plastic bench in a detention facility somewhere near Baltimore. Maybe Jessup. Maybe Frederick. No one told him. The lights overhead buzzed like angry flies. He was still in the same hoodie he’d been arrested in two nights ago. His son’s fingerprints were still smudged on the sleeve.
He hadn’t slept.
The ICE officer across the plexiglass clicked through his file without looking up.
“I have a stay,” Kilmar said, trying not to beg. “I have a judge’s order from 2019. I have U.S. citizen children. My son is disabled. He was in the car—”
“You’ll have to take it up with the courts.”
“I did. And I won.”
The officer sighed, like this wasn’t the first time he’d heard that.
“There was a database issue. You weren’t marked protected. It’s being reviewed.”
“So you’re letting me go?”
A pause.
“No. You’re on the list. You’re scheduled to be transferred. I can flag it, but you’ll need to work it out with your lawyer.”
“But he doesn’t know where I am. I wasn’t allowed a call. You didn’t tell my wife. She didn’t know where you took my son—”
“Sir, you need to calm down.”
“I’m not resisting. I’m asking. I’m protected.”
The officer looked up then. Not angry. Not cruel. Just blank.
“Then it’ll get sorted,” he said. “But you’re moving out tomorrow.”
The next day, they shackled him by the ankles, wrists, and waist. Loaded him onto a bus before sunrise. No explanation. No hearing. No access to a phone. Just a manila envelope taped shut with his name scribbled in marker.
He was flown to Alexandria, Louisiana—one of the federal staging sites for deportation flights.
It was there that the guards handed him a new form. It said only: “FINAL ORDER OF REMOVAL.”
“I don’t understand,” Kilmar said. “I don’t have a removal order. I won my case.”
No one answered.
Another detainee leaned over and whispered, “They’re rushing these flights. Biden slowed them down, but now it’s all changing again.”
“But there’s a court—there’s a judge—”
The man shrugged.
“They don’t care.”
March 15, 2025. Kilmar was shackled again and loaded onto a deportation flight alongside more than 200 others.
He didn’t know where they were going until the plane began its descent.
Through the scratched window, he saw the outline of the San Salvador volcano in the distance.
It was the first time he’d seen it in sixteen years.
He clenched his fists.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said softly. “This is against the law.”
The ICE agent beside him didn’t even look up.
“You’re here now.”
Legal Firestorm
Jennifer didn’t know he was gone until it was too late.
She’d spent three days calling every number she could find. ICE offices. Nonprofits. Private attorneys. No one would confirm his location. His name didn’t appear in any detainee search.
And then, on March 15, the calls changed. Instead of we’re looking, they said: we’re sorry.
A journalist was the one who told her: Kilmar had been put on a deportation flight to El Salvador. He was no longer in the United States.
Jennifer collapsed in the hallway. Her mother caught her before she hit the floor.
That night, she sat at the dining room table with a stack of papers Kilmar had once organized meticulously—court rulings, appeal notices, letters from immigration lawyers. She turned to the one he’d always called his seguro, his safety.
The 2019 decision from Immigration Judge David L. Morris:
“Withholding of removal GRANTED.”
It wasn’t asylum, but it meant the same thing in practical terms: Kilmar could not be deported to El Salvador because doing so would likely result in his death. It was one of the highest standards of protection under U.S. law.
And ICE had ignored it.
On March 25, ten days after the deportation, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis issued a scathing order:
“The government’s conduct in this case was not merely mistaken—it was lawless. Kilmar Abrego García was protected by a valid, binding court order. His deportation violated that order and defied the legal obligations of this administration.”
She instructed the federal government to “take immediate and appropriate diplomatic action to secure his return.”
The Justice Department filed a motion to delay.
She denied it.
The government appealed.
The Fourth Circuit affirmed her ruling, unanimously. One judge wrote:
“If the judiciary’s orders can be disregarded without consequence, then we are no longer a nation of laws.”
Jennifer held on to that sentence like a life raft.
Then came the escalation.
Kilmar’s legal team petitioned the Supreme Court for enforcement. Within days, the Court agreed to hear the case on an emergency basis.
The hearing was brief. The outcome was not.
In a 5–4 decision, the Court ruled that the executive branch was not exempt from rectifying unlawful deportations—even if the person had already been sent abroad.
Justice Sotomayor, writing for the majority:
“The Constitution does not grant the President the power to disappear individuals in defiance of judicial oversight. This man’s removal was not merely illegal. It was an affront to the rule of law.”
She added:
“The government must act—not claim helplessness behind diplomatic red tape. Kilmar Abrego García must be returned.”
The administration released a statement saying it would “review the Court’s opinion.”
But no one moved.
And Kilmar? Still no word.
No call. No message. No confirmation from El Salvador that he was even alive.
Jennifer began checking the prison rosters published online by human rights observers. Dozens of blurred mugshots. Rows of broken eyes.
She searched them all, over and over.
But his face never appeared.
The Oval Office
The rug in the Oval Office swallowed the sound of their shoes.
Cameras flashed as President Donald J. Trump guided El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele past the fireplace, both men smiling wide for the press. A handshake. A thumbs-up. The flags of two nations standing upright in the background like polite witnesses.
To the reporters packed against the velvet ropes, the meeting was a chance to ask about trade. Migration policy. A hundred other things.
But Kaitlan Collins, from CNN, cut through the noise with a single, direct question:
“Mr. President—what about Kilmar Abrego García?”
President Trump blinked.
She pressed on. “He was deported despite a court order. Despite three U.S.-born children. Despite a Supreme Court ruling that you must bring him back. Do you plan to comply?”
The air in the room tightened.
Trump leaned forward.
“Why can’t you just say that?” he snapped, jabbing a finger toward her. “Why can’t you say that he’s a bad guy? Just say it. Just say it.”
Collins tried again. “Sir, the courts have ruled—”
“He’s a gang member,” Trump cut in. “MS-13. I know. I’ve seen it. That’s what they’re not telling you.”
There was no evidence of this. Not in the court records. Not in his background checks. Not anywhere.
But Trump kept going.
“You know how many of these people come here and they lie? They game the system. They have kids, they think that makes them safe. Well, not anymore.”
Bukele, seated to Trump’s left, smiled faintly but said nothing.
The briefing ended moments later, staffers ushering reporters out with outstretched arms and practiced phrases.
But the cameras stayed on.
And so did the microphones.
One picked up Trump muttering to his close aide Stephen Miller as they turned back toward the Resolute Desk:
“He’s not our problem anymore.”
Outside, on Pennsylvania Avenue, protestors held signs in the cold wind. Some bore Kilmar’s face. Some read:
“BRING HIM HOME.”
“YOU CAN’T ERASE A FATHER.”
“THE LAW STILL MATTERS.”
Inside, the President of the United States poured himself a Diet Coke and moved on to the next meeting.
CECOT – The Silence
The air was wet and metallic.
That’s what most men noticed first when they were dragged through the gates of CECOT—El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. The biggest mega-prison in the Americas, hailed by Bukele’s government as a solution to crime, feared by the rest of the world as a monument to unchecked brutality.
They took Kilmar’s shoes at intake.
Then his belt. His name. His paperwork, if there ever was any.
No charges were read. No phone call. No record entered into the public system. Just a fingerprint, a number, and a push through the metal turnstile into a concrete belly that swallowed light.
Inside, hundreds—maybe thousands—of men sat on bare floors, backs against each other for warmth, skin burned raw from disinfectant sprayed through vents. Some were shirtless. Many bore tattoos. Others looked like they’d simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Kilmar didn’t speak.
Not because he didn’t want to—but because silence was safer.
He stayed pressed against a wall, knees to his chest, eyes down. He tried to count the days, but there was no way to track time. Lights stayed on 24 hours a day. Meals—if you could call them that—arrived without pattern. The guards rarely spoke.
Sometimes, men were taken away.
Sometimes, they came back.
Sometimes, they didn’t.
One night, the man beside him—a boy really, maybe seventeen—whispered that someone had died in another cell. “They don’t tell anyone,” the boy said. “They just spray the blood and bring in another.”
Kilmar asked once—just once—if he could contact his family.
The guard didn’t respond. Just smiled.
Back in Maryland, Jennifer clung to that silence like a disease.
She called the embassy.
They said they had no confirmation of his detention.
She emailed the Salvadoran Ministry of Justice.
They didn’t reply.
She showed up at press conferences, clutching a folder of legal documents, photographs of their children, medical records, birth certificates, court orders.
“They won’t even admit they have him,” she told a local reporter. “It’s like he fell off the planet.”
By April, it had been three weeks since anyone had seen or heard from Kilmar Abrego García.
The U.S. government, now under direct Supreme Court order to facilitate his return, told the press they were “exploring all diplomatic options.”
But when pressed further, a senior White House advisor said, off the record, “We can’t force another country to hand someone back.”
The law had spoken.
The president had ignored it.
And the man the courts said must be returned was somewhere inside a prison that didn’t keep receipts.
The Homefront
The lunchbox sat untouched.
Jennifer noticed it when she came home from work—a green plastic box with a half-eaten sandwich and one of the cartoon napkins Kilmar used to draw on to make the kids laugh. A crooked dinosaur. A speech bubble that said “¡RAWR!” in his messy block print.
It had been their youngest son’s. She hadn’t had the heart to open it. She still didn’t.
Instead, she knelt beside the couch where he was curled into a blanket, dinosaur in hand, and touched his forehead. No fever. No words, either. Just wide, blinking eyes and a stillness that pressed on her like weight.
He hadn’t slept in his bed since the arrest. He only slept on the couch now, in the spot where his father used to rest between shifts, boots still on, head tilted back, mouth half-open with the hum of exhaustion.
Her daughter, older, quieter, had stopped asking when he’d be home. But she still set a place for him at dinner. A folded napkin. A fork. An empty chair.
Sometimes Jennifer left it.
Sometimes she cleared it in silence, before the kids noticed.
She hadn’t told them everything. How could she? What words existed for Papa’s not here because our government broke the law and now a foreign one is pretending he doesn’t exist? What bedtime story covered that?
Instead, she said what she could.
“Papa is trying to come back.”
“Papa didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Papa loves you very, very much.”
But even that was starting to feel like a lie.
Outside the home, it had become a swirl of noise—press requests, protests, a rally outside the ICE field office in Baltimore. CASA de Maryland had filed an emergency motion for disclosure. Lawyers gave statements. Clergy led candlelight vigils.
She stopped opening the news alerts on her phone.
Each one was the same:
Trump defies court order.
Biden administration silent on compliance.
El Salvador denies knowledge of Kilmar’s whereabouts.
Her voicemail filled with promises.
Senators “monitoring the situation.” Journalists “committed to justice.” Advocates “standing in solidarity.”
No one offered a plan.
No one brought him home.
At night, when the kids were asleep, Jennifer stood in the kitchen and opened the freezer—just to feel something cold.
On the inside of the pantry door, Kilmar had taped a list of weekly goals:
Get the kids’ meds refilled.
Finish HVAC certification.
File taxes.
Take Jenn on a real date.
She hadn’t taken it down.
She couldn’t bring herself to.
It was the last thing he’d written before ICE disappeared him.
Echoes and Absence
They still didn’t know if he was alive.
No one would say. Not ICE. Not the embassy. Not the Salvadoran prison ministry. Not the U.S. president who had been ordered to bring him back by three courts—including the highest in the land—and refused.
A father with a court-protected status.
A husband who followed every rule.
A man disappeared.
And no one answered.
In CECOT, men vanished without paper trails.
Bodies were rumored to be buried in unmarked pits outside the compound’s perimeter, beneath concrete slabs and weeds. Human rights workers weren’t allowed inside. Lawyers were told their clients weren’t “on the list.” Names were rotated. Fates concealed.
Maybe Kilmar was still inside. Maybe he was in solitary. Maybe he was moved. Maybe worse.
The last time anyone could say for sure that he was breathing was March 15, 2025.
On the back porch of the Maryland townhouse, Jennifer sat with a box of photos and tried not to cry where the kids could hear.
She flipped through them slowly—birthdays, beach days, blurry selfies with silly faces and crossed eyes. A Halloween shot of Kilmar in a tin foil robot costume. A picture of the baby asleep on his chest. Her favorite: the four of them at the pumpkin patch. His arms around all of them, face half-lit by October sun.
She placed it on the table and stared.
It was impossible to imagine that the man in that photo—laughing, steady, tired, strong—could simply cease.
That a country could decide he didn’t count.
That courts could roar and presidents could shrug.
That a father’s absence could echo like this—through light switches, grocery lists, dinner plates, and folded socks.
In Washington, the press moved on. The protests shrank. New stories took over.
A few senators mentioned him once on the floor.
Then not again.
In El Salvador, Bukele gave another televised tour of CECOT. Men in chains. Heads bowed. Order enforced.
No mention of Kilmar.
None expected.
But in one house, every evening, a boy still clutches a dinosaur to his chest and looks toward the door at the sound of keys, any keys, hoping they might be his father’s.
And in the quiet of that waiting, in the hollow that law could not fill, the truth lingers like a wound left open by a so-called “president,” with the audacity and cruelness to say, “He is not our problem anymore.”
Author’s Note
This is not truly fiction. Not truly exaggeration. Not truly a cautionary tale from another time or country.
This happened. It is happening.
Kilmar Abrego García was ripped from his five-year-old U.S. citizen son in a Maryland parking lot by ICE agents, despite a 2019 federal court order granting him protection from deportation. He followed every law. Attended every hearing. Built a life of quiet responsibility as a father, husband, and union apprentice. And still—our government ignored the law, shackled him, and disappeared him.
A U.S. District Court ordered his return.
The Fourth Circuit upheld it.
The Supreme Court agreed.
And the President of the United States refused.
Trump stood in the Oval Office and said the quiet part out loud:
“He’s not our problem anymore.”
Kilmar was illegally deported to El Salvador on March 15, 2025. He was immediately imprisoned without charge in CECOT, a mega-prison notorious for torture, extrajudicial killings, and complete state secrecy.
As of this writing on April 15th, no one has confirmed whether he is alive.*
His family waits in silence. His son still flinches at the sound of strangers. The rule of law in this country—already frail—is bleeding at the edges.
This story is ongoing.
And it is entirely too real.
*Update: On Thursday, April 17, Senator Chris Van Hollen finally was granted access to meet with Kilmar in El Salvador, confirming proof of life. The Trump administration remains defiant and has engaged in a smear campaign in order to garner more support for their decision. The Democratic response is still the same: Due process denied one person is due process denied all.
I am crying as I read this....OMFG the disgust towards trump is indescribable. ICE enjoys their job too much. This needs to stop.......