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Edward Rudnicki is a Board Member of Power in Community Alliances (PICA) and member of the Bangor Sister City Committee. He was a member of the delegation that visited El Salvador in 2024.
The deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from Maryland to a Salvadoran mega-prison is illegal, and must not be allowed to stand. Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador to escape gang violence and was granted a court order allowing him to remain in the United States. That order, which he received in 2011, should have protected him. Instead, he was deported without warning — sent to a prison system notorious for its mass detentions and lack of due process. Now he is held in a facility alongside gang members who may very well be the very people from whom he fled.
The U.S. claims itself to be a democracy, to be a country that provides refuge to those in need. Yet cases such as this one bear an alarming resemblance to the actions of the current president of El Salvador, whom the current U.S. administration supports.
This is a regime in El Salvador with little concern for the law. Young men rounded up in El Salvador are tried in large groups with a single lawyer who is given minimal time to defend everyone in the group. Once imprisoned these young men are separated from their communities and given little chance of appeal or eventual release from prison. They, much like Abrego Garcia, may never be released from prison.
Power in Community Alliances (PICA) and the Bangor Sister City committee have a strong connection to our sister city of Carasque, El Salvador. Last year our organizations had the privilege of sending members on a delegation to Carasque.
While there we learned first hand about the effects of illegal imprisonment on the community through the story of one wrongly detained young man. He was charged with being a gang member, had very little legal protection, and is now imprisoned. This young man’s family must send funds monthly to pay for toiletries and food.
Abrego Garcia’s family is in a similar situation. He was deported without any legal representation, and now his wife does not know if she will ever see him again.
We need to put an end to deportations to El Salvador before our sons and daughters, before our friends and fellow Americans are sent there never to be returned. President Donald Trump stated that he would like to deport U.S. citizens to Salvadoran prisons. If we do not act to reverse these deportations, fight for the justice of everyone living in the United States, and shed light on what is going on in El Salvador, we will be complicit with ending the rule of law as we have known it.
The entire Supreme Court, conservatives and liberals alike, said that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was unlawful, and that he must be returned. Now we need to demand that people deported to El Salvador illegally be safely brought back to the U.S. to have their day in court. We also need to demand that the U.S. not aid the current government of El Salvador until they give their own citizens adequate representation in court to reconsider their cases.
This is a fundamental question of what kind of country we want to be. Do we believe in justice, in protecting those who seek refuge? If so, we must bring Abrego Garcia — and others like him — home. Because the United States is their home. And we cannot support regimes such as the current one in El Salvador that treat human life and liberty with such disregard.
