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The Department of Justice on Friday said the whereabouts of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland-based Salvadoran immigrant wrongly deported to an El Salvador megaprison with hundreds of criminals and gang members last month, are unknown.
The admission comes after the Supreme Court upheld a lower federal court’s decision Thursday to facilitate Garcia’s return from the Central American prison. It also comes after U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the DOJ to submit more information about Garcia following the SCOTUS ruling.
Xinis on Thursday evening ordered the DOJ to file the following information no later than 9:30 a.m. on Friday: “(1) the current physical location and custodial status of Abrego Garcia; (2) what steps, if any, Defendants have taken to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s immediate return to the United States; and (3) what additional steps Defendants will take, and when, to facilitate his return.”
DOJ officials and AbregoGarcia’s attorneys had a hearing in federal court on Friday afternoon, at which point Judge Xinis repeatedly asked DOJ attorney Drew Ensign about Garcia’s whereabouts.
DOJ attorneys added that the federal court did not give a sufficient amount of time to “review the Supreme Court’s Order following the dissolution of the administrative stay in this case.”
“Defendants are not in a position where they ‘can’ share any information requested by the Court. That is the reality.”
They further stated in the court filing that the DOJ defendants are reviewing SCOTUS order and “actively evaluating next steps.”
A prison officer guards a cell at maximum security penitentiary CECOT (Center for the Compulsory Housing of Terrorism) on April 4, 2025, in Tecoluca, San Vicente, El Salvador. ( (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images))
“It is unreasonable and impracticable for Defendants to reveal potential steps before those steps are reviewed, agreed upon, and vetted. Foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review,” Ensign and other DOJ attorneys wrote.
Federal court filings showed Abrego Garcia had fled El Salvador to escape gang violence. Starting around 2006, gang members “stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion.”
He entered the United States illegally in 2011 and traveled to Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, lived.
Around 2016, Abrego Garcia became romantically involved with a female U.S. citizen — Jennifer Vasquez Sura — and her two children, also U.S. citizens. They moved in together and the woman became pregnant with his child. Abrego Garcia worked in the construction industry to support his family, court filings say.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA’s Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Md., Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
On March 28, 2019, Abrego Garcia went to a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Maryland, to solicit employment and was recruited by three other men. Prince George County Police Department soon arrived at the scene and detained all four men.
At the police station, the four young men were placed into different rooms and questioned. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was asked if he was a gang member; when he told police he was not, they said that they did not believe him and repeatedly demanded that he provide information about other gang members,” court documents state. “The police told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that he would be released if he cooperated, but he repeatedly explained that he did not have any information to give because he did not know anything.”
A judge later granted his release, and Abrego Garcia married his now-wife in 2019. He did, however, miss the birth of his child while in federal custody, the federal complaint says.
Abrego Garcia was arrested in Baltimore on March 12 after he worked a shift as a sheet metal apprentice in Baltimore and picked up his now-5-year-old son, who has autism and other disabilities, from his grandmother’s house, the complaint says.
