Husband mistakenly deported, wife caught in political crossfire

THE wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration, has been moved to a safe house by supporters after US officials posted a court document on social media that included the family’s address.

- MARIA LUISA PAUL

Jennifer Vasquez Sura said in an interview with The Washington Post that she began fearing for her safety and that of her three children — two of whom are autistic — after verbal attacks on her husband by President Donald Trump himself, as well as taunts on social media by administration officials and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

The couple’s home was usually filled with the sounds of family, including pans clattering while her husband cooked, the three kids tumbling through the day, the TV humming in the background. Now, she is on her own with the children — one nonverbal and another prone to seizures — and their new home is uncomfortably silent.

Vasquez Sura is also overwhelmed by the glaring spotlight of the legal battle over her husband's case, which has become a lightning rod for Trump’s broader effort to deport millions who have entered the US illegally — regardless of whether, like Abrego Garcia, they later obtained protections barring deportation. Nevertheless, she has become her husband’s fiercest advocate.

“I didn’t even think it would become this big — it just happened,” Vasquez Sura said in an interview with The Post. “But if God threw me in this, I know he’s going to take me out of it. So this is God’s battle. And I’m going to fight it — for Kilmar and for everyone.”

The laughter that used to fill the family’s home has been replaced by muffled crying - or the quiet murmur of her youngest son cuddling with the neon construction vest her husband left behind. The texts Vasquez Sura and her children still send to Abrego Garcia go unanswered, marked only by a single grey check mark.

“Honestly,” Vasquez Sura said, with tears pooling in her eyes, “I just want my husband back, my best friend back, my kids’ father back. I want our life back.”

A family history politicised