Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday said Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador, is “not a Maryland man.”
Abrego Garcia, who is Salvadoran, illegally immigrated to the U.S. in 2011 as a teenager, but was given a “withholding of removal” status in 2019, having argued that he faced threats to his life from gang violence in his home country. He was a married father of three who worked as a sheet metal apprentice.
Bondi said on Fox News’s “Jesse Watters Primetime” Monday night that none of that made Abrego Garcia a “Maryland man,” as he has often been called in media reports.
“Jesse, you know, when you’re listening to all these liberal reporters, they keep calling him a Maryland man. He’s not a Maryland man. He’s part of foreign terrorist organization. He’s a member of MS-13, who, as you laid out in your monologue, came to this country and committed just gang acts,” she said.
Abrego Garcia’s family has denied the allegations of ties to MS-13 gang or criminal activity, and the courts have so far found the Trump administration’s claims unpersuasive.
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived,” Judge Paula Xinis wrote in an order last week.
The Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court order for the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, after officials previously admitted he was deported due to an administrative error.
But on Sunday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a court filing that federal courts have “no authority” to make the Trump administration seek Abrego Garcia’s return. And Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy adviser, is now arguing that his deportation was not a mistake at all.
“The federal courts have no authority to direct the Executive Branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump officials said in the filing.
On Monday, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said he had no plans to send back Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
“How could I return him to the United States? I smuggle him to the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele told reporters.
In her appearance on Fox News Monday, Bondi responded to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys saying he’s not affiliated with a gang.
“They’re wrong and he has no right to be there, but for an extra step in paperwork, just like you said, he would go right back to El Salvador, which is his home country, where he belongs,” she added.
The Hill has reached out to lawyers for Abrego Garcia for comment.
