Image by Jez Timms.

I didn’t want to write this article.

In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence. But other excellent writers beat me to that one.

So instead, I reluctantly find myself once again focusing on U.S. torture, a subject I’ve studied and written about since the autumn of 2001, including in a couple of books. I’d naively hoped never to have to do so again, but here we are.

The Rendition of Kilmar Abrego García

This March, the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego García to a notorious hellhole in El Salvador. That mega-prison is known by the acronym CECOT for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. (In English, the Terrorism Confinement Center.) There he was beaten and tortured in violation of both this country’s immigration and federal laws, as well as the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, or CAT, to which the United States is a signatory.

It didn’t matter that Abrego García was in this country legally and that, as a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge, his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.” In fact, the Department of Justice later rewarded its own lawyer’s honesty by firing him.

Kilmar Abrego García is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States “without inspection” (that is, undetected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in 2011. He was sixteen-years-old and fleeing his home country where, “[b]eginning 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,” according to a civil suit filed against various U.S. officials. “He then made his way to the state of Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, resided.”

Abrego García lived in Maryland for years, working as a day laborer. In 2016, he began a relationship with a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, and in 2018, they moved in together. They conceived a child and Abrego García did construction work to support the family, which included his wife’s two children, both U.S. citizens. In March 2019, however, he and three other men were arrested outside a Home Depot by Prince George’s County, Maryland police. They turned him over to ICE, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence that he was a member of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13. The “evidence” in question included the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant had identified him to a detective as a member of an MS-13 group operating out of Long Island, New York, where he had never lived. (The detective was later suspended for unrelated infractions.)

After almost six months in detention, during which time his son was born, an immigration court granted Abrego García a “withholding of removal.” That meant he would be allowed to remain in the United States and could legally work here, because he was believed to face genuine danger were he to be deported to El Salvador. He was required to check in annually with ICE, which he did, most recently in early January 2025.

Things were going relatively well. He had become a union member and was employed full time as a first-year sheet metal apprentice on a trajectory toward a rewarding career in the building trades. On March 12, 2025, however, everything changed. He was driving home from his jobsite after picking up his son (who is deaf in one ear, has intellectual disabilities, and does not speak) when ICE officers pulled his car over and arrested him. Officers gave his wife just 10 minutes to arrive and get their child, threatening to turn him over to Child Protective Services if she missed that deadline.

After being shuttled from state to state, Abrego García ended up at a Louisiana detention center, from which he was indeed deported to El Salvador along with several other men........

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