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* In March 2019, Prince George's County, Maryland, police arrested Abrego Garcia and three other men in a Home Depot parking lot, where they were seeking work as day laborers.[2][19] One of the men claimed Abrego Garcia was a "gang member," but The Atlantic reported that, according to court filings, the man offered no proof and police said they did not believe him.[19] Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime in connection to his arrest.[20]

Police handed custody of Abrego Garcia over to ICE for deportation proceedings. In those proceedings, the government claimed that he was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang because "he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie" and a confidential informant claimed that he was active with an MS-13 group based in New York,[2] where he has never lived.[16] ICE relied on information from a form that was filled out by a local police officer who was suspended not long after for "giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker", and thus was unavailable when Abrego Garcia's lawyer sought more information.[21] Roger Parloff of Lawfare notes that since neither the officer nor the informant were cross-examined, the accusation went through two layers of hearsay to reach the immigration court. An immigration judge determined that the informant's claim[22] was sufficient evidence for the purpose of denying Abrego Garcia's bond request; another judge upheld that ruling on appeal, saying the claim was not clearly wrong.[18] However, no court has ever made a "full adjudication" of this issue.[18] *

The evidence of him being a member of MS13 is dubious at best, and suspicious since he and his brother had fled to the US to escape gangs in El Salvador.

He didn't fail to deport, he applied for asylum and withholding of removal during the process. Asylum wasn't possible because it needed to be applied for within a year of arriving, but he was granted withholding of removal, which he'd maintained by checking in yearly with ICE since 2019.