On March 15, the Trump administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 30-year-old El Salvadoran national living in Maryland since 2011, to El Salvador. Days later, Abrego Garcia sued members of President Donald Trump’s administration for wrongfully deporting him.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg ’97, head of litigation at Murray Osorio PLLC, an immigration law firm with an office in Silver Spring, Maryland, is one of Abrego Garcia’s plaintiff’s lawyers in the case.
Sandoval-Moshenberg said he has been involved in immigrant rights activism most of his life, and he decided to go to law school and became an immigration lawyer. He grew up in the Arlandria neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, which has significant Salvadoran and Honduran immigrant communities.
The lawsuit accused the Trump administration of deporting Abrego Garcia in violation of a 2019 court order that barred the U.S. government from sending him to El Salvador because he feared gang persecution there. Following the March 15 deportation, Abrego Garcia spent nearly three months in the Salvadoran Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) mega-prison.
The administration alleged Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang, which his family denies.
The administration and the Salvadoran government returned Abrego Garcia to the U.S. in June amid mounting political and legal pressure against his deportation, and after the Department of Justice filed smuggling charges against Abrego Garcia.
“They were constantly telling him you’re going to die here,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said about Abrego Garcia’s time at CECOT. “You’re never going to see the light of day ever again,” he said Abrego Garcia was told. Sandoval-Moshenberg said Abrego Garcia suffered physical and psychological torture for weeks at CECOT.
According to Sandoval-Moshenberg, Salvadoran authorities prevented a Salvadoran lawyer from visiting Abrego Garcia at CECOT, and Abrego Garcia didn’t know lawyers were fighting for him. “He wasn’t allowed access to visits. He wasn’t even allowed access to phone calls,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
Sandoval-Moshenberg said he’s met with Abrego Garcia in person twice, and he’s talked with him on Zoom numerous times. When Abrego Garcia was in El Salvador, Sandoval-Moshenberg was only in contact with Abrego Garcia’s wife.
History teacher Sue Ikenberry remembered teaching Sandoval-Moshenberg in the 1990s. “My main memory of Simon is that he was always intensely interested in politics and in social causes,” she said. “He’s a real hero.”
Sandoval-Moshenberg said he and his colleagues are fighting for the Trump administration to send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica. “The administration has just made clear that they’re not going to rest, and they’re not going to leave him alone, and they’re determined to make an example of him by deporting him,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
According to Sandoval-Moshenberg, Costa Rica offered Abrego Garcia refugee status, and in Costa Rica he would be shielded from deportation to El Salvador. Sandoval-Moshenberg said that true justice for Abrego Garcia would be allowing him to stay in the U.S., but that is not an achievable goal. “When push comes to shove, at this point in time, we’re not fighting for the right to stay in the U.S.,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
The case is now in its fourth month as the Trump administration is attempting to deport him to a third-party country. “It’s pretty fair to assume there’s going to be appeals,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said about a resolution for the case. “This case might well make it back up to the Supreme Court a second time. I hope it doesn’t. I hope they just leave well enough alone, but I kind of doubt it’s going to happen.” In April, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. had to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S.
Since August, the Trump administration has attempted to deport Abrego Garcia to four different countries: Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and Liberia. The administration planned to deport him to Liberia by Oct. 31, but as of publication of this article he had yet to be deported there. A federal judge in Maryland issued an injunction to temporarily prevent the Trump administration from deporting Garcia to Liberia.
Sandoval-Moshenberg was involved in a third-party country deportation case in the first Trump administration. “We developed some statistics that third country deportation only happened in like 1.5 percent of cases, basically. It was extraordinarily rare, and now it’s happening all the time,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “The third-party countries, especially Mexico, are just completely complicit in these human rights violations,” he said. The U.S. has used Mexico as a third-party country for deportations more than any other country.
“This was the first case in which the Trump administration, at least the Second Trump administration, came down hard on an individual person,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “The Abrego Garcia case is really leading the way.” He said that Abrego Garcia’s case can be a model for James Comey, a former director of the FBI under Trump; Letitia James, the New York Attorney General; and John Bolton, a former Trump national security advisor, all of whom the Trump administration is targeting.
Sandoval-Moshenberg noted that even though the case has received lots of attention, Abrego Garcia wasn’t in the political world prior to his deportation. “He’s not someone who chose to put himself in the spotlight, chose to become the center of a national movement or a national outcry,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “If it can happen to someone like him, it can happen to absolutely anyone.”
Lucy Newman and Sam Gross contributed reporting.
CORRECTION (Nov. 3 at 7:21 a.m.): A previous version of this article misspelled Abrego Garcia’s name in the headline and once in the article.