A Maryland community is on edge after Abrego Garcia deported

LANGLEY PARK, Md. — Five weeks after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison, this Prince George’s County community filled with Latino immigrants is experiencing a familiar sense of foreboding.

The feeling of persistent dread reminds some of the coronavirus pandemic years, when many immigrants not only faced the threat of serious illness but couldn’t receive unemployment benefits or stimulus checks because they lacked legal status.

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have stepped up raids to keep President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, residents describe a similar sense of powerlessness, of girding to battle an enemy they can’t see until it’s too late.

“There are a lot of people losing sleep right now. There are a lot of people crying,” said an undocumented Langley Park single mother who arrived in the country 19 years ago. She came from Guatemala, joining many others in Langley Park who converse in Spanish and the Mayan language spoken in portions of the Central American country.

She spoke on condition of anonymity due to fear of being deported. While she is undocumented, two of her three children are American citizens.

Immigration was at the heart of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and polls showed voters demanded reforms. Trump says mass deportation is needed to reverse the lax border policies of his predecessor, Democratic President Joe Biden.

The president plans to “marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history,” spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said after the election.

Langley Park, a community of about 22,000 people whose cultural life is dominated by colorful street fairs and the Catholic Church, is about 7 miles from Beltsville, where Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old sheet metal apprentice, lived with his wife, a U.S. citizen, their 5-year-old son and two stepchildren. He was deported to El Salvador last month due to what a Trump administration attorney called an “administrative error.”

“The issue is that there is an inherent assumption that these people are undocumented, and that’s not necessarily the case, right?” said state Del. Deni Taveras, a Democrat who represents Langley Park.

The fear, she said, is that immigrants can get detained because they are “walking while Hispanic, or walking while African or Haitian.”

Another of Taveras’ constituents — a businesswoman living near Langley Park — has protected status like Abrego Garcia, but said his and others’ deportations make her anxious because they feel indiscriminate.

“I have my own home, a corporate job, I pay my taxes,” said the woman, who requested anonymity to speak about sensitive immigration issues. “With this administration, you’re always looking over your shoulder: ‘Do I have my ID?’ The fact that you’re brown is going to make them ask: ‘What’s your status?’”

She arrived in the United States from El Salvador when she was 12 and is enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program that protects people brought to the country as children from deportation.

Still, she says: “I feel like how a criminal hiding from the law must feel.”

Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said earlier this year that ICE’s priorities should be the “criminal drug dealers, the rapists, the murderers, the individuals who have committed heinous acts on the interior of our country and who have terrorized law-abiding American citizens.”

“But that doesn’t mean,” she said, “that the other illegal criminals who entered our nation’s borders are off the table.”

Abrego Garcia’s case has become a platform for a national debate over the scope of Trump’s authority. Trump’s administration has publicly called Abrego Garcia an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker and illegal alien.

Congressional Democrats say Abrego Garcia, who had been in the United States legally since 2019, was denied due process and that Trump is defying federal court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to bring him home from an El Salvador prison and telling “lies” about Abrego Garcia that cast him as a gang member or terrorist.

Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen visited Abrego Garcia in El Salvador Thursday and called again for him to be immediately brought back to Maryland.

While Trump’s first administration also ordered immigrant raids through 2020, this period feels different, said Cathryn Jackson, public policy director at CASA, the immigrants’ advocacy organization.

“The last month in particular has really felt like a reckoning — a reckoning with the truth about how this country treats immigrants,” Jackson said.

While the “brazenness” of what happened to Abrego Garcia is noteworthy, this otherwise feels like “heartbreak on repeat. You know this isn’t new, right?” she said.

Taveras, the state delegate, said Langley Park has a toughness that comes from confronting adversity in various forms.

In 2020, she said she helped organize nine food pantries to help feed people in her district during COVID, and a local grocery store, Megamart, distributed free food and vouchers.

On Good Friday, several thousand people showed up for an indoor-outdoor Mass and celebration that featured street vendors selling pupusas, tamales and other ethnic fare.

“We have a strong sense of community,” Taveras said. “We’ve definitely banded together.”