Pam Bondi’s latest excuse for refusing to bring back a mistakenly deported Maryland dad is that his wife and disabled child—who have begged for his release—are better off without him.
“America is safer because he is gone. Maryland is safer because he is gone. And that woman that he is married to and that child he had with her? They are safer tonight because he is out of our country and sitting in El Salvador where he belongs,” President Donald Trump’s attorney general said Wednesday of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Earlier that day, the Department of Homeland Security had posted a copy of a temporary restraining order that Jennifer Vasquez Sura took out in 2021 after a domestic dispute. The order said that Abrego Garcia had “punched and scratched petitioner, ripped off shirt, grabbed and bruised petitioner.”
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The judge ordered Abrego Garcia to move out of the family home and not to contact Vasquez Sura. It gave full custody of their son, who was almost 2 at the time, to his mother. Abrego Garcia is also stepfather to two of Vasquez Sura’s children from a previous marriage.
The restraining order was dismissed about a month later after Vasquez Sura decided not to appear at a hearing to extend it, court records show.
“Things did not escalate, and I decided not to follow through with the civil court process,” she told CNN in a statement Wednesday. “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling. Our marriage only grew stronger in the years that followed. No one is perfect, and no marriage is perfect.”
“That is not a justification for ICE’s action of abducting him and deporting him to a country where he was supposed to be protected from deportation,” she added. “Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.”
President Donald Trump’s administration has admitted it mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia—who had a full-time job and legal protected status—to El Salvador’s nightmarish CECOT mega prison. Inmates sleep on bare metal racks, are kept in their cells 23 and a half hours per day, and are denied visitors, recreation, and education.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled the U.S. government must “facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador,” and Vasquez Sura has pleaded with officials to bring him home.
But the administration has refused to take steps to secure his release, according to the federal judge overseeing a legal challenge to his detention. Instead, officials have tried to litigate the issue in the press by claiming over and over again that immigration judges have found he was a member of the MS-13 gang.
In fact, no judge ever made that ruling. He was denied bail in 2019 during an immigration hearing because a police detective wrote on an interview form that a confidential informant had told him Abrego-Garcia was a member of an MS-13 clique operating out of New York, where Abrego Garcia had never lived.
During his removal hearings, the detective wasn’t available to testify because he’d been suspended for leaking confidential information to a sex worker whom he was paying for sex. The gang unit said it didn’t have any other evidence besides that one instance of double hearsay. And police didn’t have any incident reports that included Abrego Garcia’s name.
He was released and given a form of legal protection called a “withholding of removal order” saying he couldn’t be deported to El Salvador—which he had fled at age 16 because of gang persecution—because he was more likely than no to be harmed if he returned.
The Trump administration released two documents Wednesday in support of its claims, citing Abrego Garcia’s clothing and a confidential informant’s information as evidence of alleged gang membership.
“As we continue through holy week, my heart aches for my husband, who should have been leading our Easter prayers,” Vasquez Sura said Tuesday before a hearing on his case. “Instead, I find myself pleading with the Trump administration and the [Salvadoran President Naybi] Bukele administration to stop playing political games with the life of Kilmar.”
“I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive,” she added. “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.”
Over the past few weeks, the government has had ample opportunity to introduce evidence in court that Abrego Garcia was violent towards his family and community, or involved in criminal gangs.
Throughout the proceedings, lawyers for the Department of Justice have failed to present any evidence of gang affiliation, according to court filings. Eventually, government lawyers “abandon[ed]” their earlier position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community,” a federal appeals court found.
By Bondi’s estimate, though, Trump is the one who has been wronged in all of this as the government’s actions have generated negative headlines.
“Every American should be thanking President Trump tonight, and every liberal journalist who has called him a ‘Maryland man’ and is saying he was rightfully in this country should be apologizing to President Trump,” she said.
