The tiny neighborhood of Los Nogales, with its pinkish-red bougainvilleas and a small knot of streets rising above El Salvador’s capital, seems cut off from the sprawling city below.
Senda 3, a cul-de-sac at the heart of the neighborhood, dead-ends into bushes and trees. Houses are jammed together. Neighbors walk a few steps to makeshift tiendas, or shops, nestled inside front rooms behind plastic sheeting, or metal bars, or both.
This is the street where Kilmar Abrego Garcia spent his early years. And the street he fled to come to America.
He was a teenager when he left to build a new life in a new country. He’s 29 now and back in El Salvador, this time in prison, a father of three caught in a standoff among President Donald Trump, the courts, some members of Congress and the Salvadoran government.
Abrego Garcia’s deportation – and the Trump administration’s refusal to return him to the United States, even though it admits he was sent back to El Salvador by mistake – has made him the most high-profile target of Trump’s campaign to expel millions of migrants who entered the United States illegally.
The Justice Department insists Abrego Garcia is a member of a dangerous criminal gang. Abrego Garcia, who had lived in Maryland for years before he was deported, insists he is not.
Regardless of who is right, Abrego Garcia’s story begins here, in Los Nogales, on Senda 3.
The small terrace house he lived in with his parents and two siblings is still standing. His mother, Cecilia, referred to affectionately as “Cece” by old friends, made pupusas there with the help of her three young children every Friday, Saturday and Sunday and sold them to neighbors.
A woman named Rocio, who is in her 30s and lives just two doors down, proudly showed off photos of Abrego Garcia, his sister and his older brother Cesar attending a birthday party in her home.