Abrego Garcia’s Wife Pleads for End to ‘Political Games’ Before Judge Slams Trump Admin

Lawyers from the Department of Justice clashed with a Maryland district court judge as they once again resisted compliance with a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from El Salvador. 

Ahead of the hearing, Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura — who is an American citizen — spoke to reporters and a gathered crowd of protesters, delivering an emotional plea for the return of her husband. “Today is 34 days after his disappearance, and I stand before you filled with a spirit that refuses to bring down,” she said. “I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive. Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn’t forgotten about you. Our children are asking, ‘When will you come home?’ And I pray for the day I tell them the time and date that you will return.” 

“As we continue through holy week, my heart aches for my husband,” she added. “Who should have been here leading our Easter prayers — instead, I find myself pleading with the Trump administration and the Bukele administration to stop playing political games with the life of Kilmar.”

“Enough is enough,” she concluded. “My family can’t be robbed of another day without seeing Kilmar. This administration has already taken so much from my children, from Kilmar’s mother, brother, sisters, and me.”

Abrego Garcia was one of over 200 migrants summarily sent into the custody of El Salvador under the attempted use of the Alien Enemies Act — an 18th century wartime law that allows the president to suspend the rights of citizens of a hostile foreign power in order to deport them. Abrego Garcia and his fellow detainees were dumped in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) a mega-prison in El Salvador with a documented history of human rights abuses. 

The Trump administration has openly flouted a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States, despite an admission from the Department of Homeland Security that the Maryland man was wrongfully deported. 
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On Tuesday, lawyers for Abrego Garcia told Maryland District Court Judge Paula Xinis that the Trump administration had made no effort to secure his release from El Salvador’s custody and return him to the United States. 

Judge Xinis agreed. “To date, what the record shows is that nothing has been done — nothing.”

“You made your jurisdictional arguments, you made your venue arguments. You made your arguments on the merits. You lost. This is now about the scope of the remedy,” Judge Xinis said of the Supreme Court’s ruling against the Department of Homeland Security.

She ultimately ordered an two-week inquiry into the administration’s refusal to comply with the court order, and told the parties to brace themselves for potentially weeks of intensive discovery, adding: “We’re going to do this by the federal rules of civil procedure. So no press release is going to move the court the same way [as] sworn, under oath testimony from persons with knowledge. … If you have objections, you’re going to have to make them consistent with the rules,”
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Judge Xinis was unequivocal in her rejection of the Trump administration’s claims that their only obligations under the Supreme Court’s order was to assist in the physical transportation of Abrego Garcia to the United States should the government of El Salvador choose to release him. “When a wrongfully removed individual from the United States is outside the borders it’s not so cut and dry that all you have to do is remove domestic barriers,” she said, adding that the government’s’s attempts to play semantics with the word “facilitate” fly “in the face of the plain meaning of the word.”

“Every day Mr. Abrego Garcia is detained in CECOT is another day of irreparable harm,” Judge Xinis said.