No, most of CECOT is prisoners arrested within El Salvador. Only a small section is previously US domiciled persons. The US only funded 300 of the available 40,000 slots. Most of them were from domestic gang round-ups, though I'm sure that process was highly imperfect.
So Mr. Garcia will be surrounded by a gigantic cohort of legitimate, full body 'MS-13' tattood, hard hitting gang members. If he wasn't in a gang before he likely is now, or getting the living shit beat out of him because he lacks gang protection.
I don’t believe there was any claim of asylum, rather he was ruled to be deported in around 2019, and held to be deportable on appeal, and then he failed to deport and was once again apprehended in 2025. His status changed when MS13 was designated a terrorist group (he was adjudicated to belong to MS13 during the deportation proceedings) which did away with his special request to not be sent to El Salvador.
He claimed asylum but it was denied because it was too late. After the deportation order there was an order of withholding from deportation, after which it appears he was granted some form of work authorization and parole with annual check ins.
Nevertheless I strongly believe if the US had just dumped him in a village in El Salvador none of this would be news. They have done that to US citizens and hardly anyone noticed. The real story is he was sent into an experimental contract foreign prison at the behest of the government and the violation of the withholding order provides the wedge to challenge it and eventually wedge to make it easier to challenge more happenings at CECOT. Even if he is an MS13 member, the government never used due process to withdraw the withholding of removal order that they are claiming should no longer exist.
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In March 2019, Prince George's County, Maryland, police arrested Abrego Garcia and three other men in a Home Depot parking lot, where they were seeking work as day laborers.[2][19] One of the men claimed Abrego Garcia was a "gang member," but The Atlantic reported that, according to court filings, the man offered no proof and police said they did not believe him.[19] Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime in connection to his arrest.[20]
Police handed custody of Abrego Garcia over to ICE for deportation proceedings. In those proceedings, the government claimed that he was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang because "he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie" and a confidential informant claimed that he was active with an MS-13 group based in New York,[2] where he has never lived.[16] ICE relied on information from a form that was filled out by a local police officer who was suspended not long after for "giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker", and thus was unavailable when Abrego Garcia's lawyer sought more information.[21] Roger Parloff of Lawfare notes that since neither the officer nor the informant were cross-examined, the accusation went through two layers of hearsay to reach the immigration court. An immigration judge determined that the informant's claim[22] was sufficient evidence for the purpose of denying Abrego Garcia's bond request; another judge upheld that ruling on appeal, saying the claim was not clearly wrong.[18] However, no court has ever made a "full adjudication" of this issue.[18]
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The evidence of him being a member of MS13 is dubious at best, and suspicious since he and his brother had fled to the US to escape gangs in El Salvador.
He didn't fail to deport, he applied for asylum and withholding of removal during the process. Asylum wasn't possible because it needed to be applied for within a year of arriving, but he was granted withholding of removal, which he'd maintained by checking in yearly with ICE since 2019.
So Mr. Garcia will be surrounded by a gigantic cohort of legitimate, full body 'MS-13' tattood, hard hitting gang members. If he wasn't in a gang before he likely is now, or getting the living shit beat out of him because he lacks gang protection.