The Trump administration has been heavily criticized for mistakenly sending Abrego Garcia to his home country and putting him in CNET, El Salvador’s notorious prison, when Garcia’s deportation paperwork stated he should not have been sent back because he feared for his life.
Seizing on the mistake, Democrats on Capitol Hill accused the Trump administration of clumsily endangering Abrego Garcia’s life and of unfairly sending an innocent “Maryland man” to the prison on flimsy evidence he is a gang member.
Some Democrats even traveled to El Salvador, where they met Abrego Garcia in person and demanded his release from prison and return to the United States.
Ira Mehlman, of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, points out that Abrego Garcia was likely involved in human trafficking when he was stopped by law enforcement in Tennessee in 2022.
According to body camera footage of that traffic stop, the state troopers on the scene conclude they are witnessing human trafficking because the automobile is packed with eight male passengers with no luggage. When the state troopers ran Abrego Garcia’s name in the National Crime Information Center database, he came back as a suspected gang member.
Over the weekend, when that traffic stop footage was aired on Fox News, USA Today released audio of Garcia’s wife telling a court in 2020 he repeatedly beat her. She appeared in court seeking a protective order from him.
“He was actually somebody who was a serial domestic abuser,” Mehlman says of Abrego Garcia.
Citing the court documents for his deportation, Mehlman says immigration court judges were convinced the illegal alien was a gang member, and the reason he wasn’t supposed to be deported to El Salvador was his fear of rival gangs there.
“This guy that they turned into a cause celeb,” Mehlman tells AFN, “was anything but a choirboy.”
5/8/2025: Original headline revised to more accurately reflect story content.
