Kilmar’s Story Should Break the Nation’s Heart

One man's story. One family's pain. And a government that chose cruelty over the Constitution.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia should be home in Maryland with his wife and children. Instead, he's imprisoned in El Salvador's CECOT facility, one of the harshest detention centers in the world.

He's not a criminal. He's a legal U.S. resident, a union sheet metal worker, a husband to a U.S. citizen, a stepfather to two children with special needs, and the father of a five-year-old son with autism and a hearing impairment who is non-verbal. That child now reaches for a father who isn’t coming home. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, has been left alone to hold the family together while fighting for his return.

And the government responsible for tearing their family apart is not El Salvador’s. It’s ours.

Despite a federal court order barring his deportation, the Trump administration sent Kilmar out of the country anyway. They blamed a bureaucratic mistake. But justice doesn’t collapse because of paperwork. It collapses when people in power decide the rules don’t apply to them.

I’ve spent much of my adult life studying the gap between what America claims to be and what it actually is. That gap is where my ancestors, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, fought. And today, that’s where Kilmar’s story lives.