The One Cop Who Claimed Abrego Garcia Was MS-13 Got Suspended a Month Later for ‘Serious Professional Misconduct’ And Pled Guilty

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President Donald Trump and his administration have vociferously defended the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his imprisonment in an El Salvadoran prison by claiming he was a member of the MS-13 gang — an accusation that was always flimsy but has been revealed to be even more questionable in light of new reports about the police officer who made that original claim.

Abrego Garcia, an immigrant from El Salvador, was arrested in Baltimore in March and sent to the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, abbreviated CECOT, a notorious maximum security prison in Tecoluca established by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele that is well-documented to be a cesspool of human rights abuses.

In multiple court filings, at least three separate Trump administration officials have conceded that Abrego Garcia had been mistakenly deported because of an “administrative error.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to arrange his return, writing that the evidence “reflects that Abrego Garcia was apprehended in Maryland without legal basis … and without further process or legal justification was removed to El Salvador.” The Supreme Court upheld Xinis’ order, asking her to clarify some points, but also instructed the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release and return to the U.S.

Nonetheless, the White House has continued to insist that Abrego Garcia’s arrest, deportation, and imprisonment were justified, by calling him a gang member and “terrorist,” and claimed that the U.S. is powerless to get him back from CECOT.

There is no evidence of Abrego Garcia being a gang member or terrorist. He has not ever been convicted or even charged with such crimes or affiliations — or any crime, period.

Specifically regarding the MS-13 allegation, a new report by Greg Sargent at The New Republic has further shattered that claim’s already extremely shaky credibility.

“But not only is the existing evidence of this criminality exceedingly thin; we’ve now learned that the officer who attested to it was suspended very soon after for serious professional misconduct, suggesting the whole process may have been even more dubious than previously known,” wrote Sargent.

Sargent’s report described what happened when Abrego Garcia was detained by the Prince George’s County Police Department in Maryland in March 2019:

County police asked him whether he was a gang member, which he denied.

Abrego Garcia was not charged with a crime, and on the basis of his undocumented status was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which moved to deport him. Abrego Garcia sought asylum, and during those proceedings, ICE claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.

To support this claim, ICE relied on what’s known as a Gang Field Interview Sheet, supplied by the Prince George’s County Police. It claimed that Abrego Garcia wore a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, that this was evidence of membership in MS-13, and that a “confidential source” had related that he was a member of the gang’s Westerns clique. But that operates in New York, where he never lived.

In the 2019 proceedings, an immigration judge ultimately granted Abrego Garcia “withholding of removal,” which barred his transfer to El Salvador on grounds that he’d face harm there. This is the status the Trump administration knowingly ignored by deporting him to that country in March, which the Supreme Court has now declared “illegal.” (The administration claims it has no obligation to return him, a case that falls apart under scrutiny.)

It should go without saying that simply wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie is woefully insufficient evidence of gang membership; to argue otherwise would necessitate arresting at least a dozen guys from my graduating high school class in suburban Orlando and in virtually every other town across America over the past three decades.

That solitary “confidential source” made a questionable hearsay claim without other evidence and one police officer took that and filled out a gang information sheet claiming Abrego Garcia was in MS-13 Records show that officer was Ivan Mendez, who was PGCPD’s lead detective on Abrego Garcia’s case at the time.

As Sargent reported, by April 2019, the very next month after Abrego Garcia’s detention in March, Mendez “was subsequently suspended from the force for a serious transgression: giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker,” indicted, pled guilty, and was sentenced to probation.

The PGCPD’s press release on Mendez’s indictment stated he was “accused of providing confidential information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts,” and that “[t]he information he provided focused on an on-going police investigation.”

“This is clearly not an officer that respects the rules and protocols,” said Lucia Curiel, an attorney who represented Abrego Garcia in 2019 and is on his current legal team. “If he’s willing to do that, what else is he willing to do?”

This article has been updated with additional information.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.