Abrego Garcia’s own wife seems to have disagreed, at one point, with the claim that he’s a harmless ‘family man.’

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at Democrats’ attempts to scare Americans using the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, and cover more media misses.

Maryland Family Man

Not content to attack the Trump administration for failing to go through the proper channels before deporting a man who should have, by rights, been deported, Democrats have insisted on defending Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a Maryland family man, even as new details have emerged about past allegations of domestic abuse and human trafficking.

Abrego Garcia, an alleged member of MS-13 in the U.S. illegally, was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador last month despite a judicial order barring his deportation to El Salvador based on his claims that he’d be persecuted by a gang if returned to his home country. Under the order, Abrego Garcia could have been legally deported to another country, just not to El Salvador.

Government officials acknowledged in court that his deportation was an administrative error. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. for proper deportation proceedings.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has said documents prove Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 and has brought to light previous domestic violence allegations brought against the Maryland man by his wife in 2021, along with a 2022 report suspecting him of engaging in labor/human trafficking.

Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, petitioned for an order of protection against him in May 2021, according to Maryland court documents. She also filed for an order in 2020. She claimed he punched, scratched, grabbed, and bruised her.

And a 2022 Homeland Security Investigations report stated that Abrego Garcia was suspected of human trafficking and that “official law enforcement investigations” revealed that Abrego-Garcia was a member of MS-13.

The report says a Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper stopped Abrego Garcia in 2022 after he was “observed speeding” and unable to stay in his lane. The trooper discovered eight individuals in the car with Abrego Garcia, who said he was driving from Houston, Texas, to Temple Hills, Md., to “perform construction work.” The trooper suspected Abrego Garcia was trafficking the passengers as there was no luggage in the vehicle and the passengers gave the same address as Abrego Garcia’s home address.

Lawyers for Abrego Garcia contend he was living in the U.S. legally and is not a member of MS-13.

Democrats have in recent years made a habit of elevating regular people to stardom, only to find out later that the person has a less-than-rosy past. Take, for example, lawyer Michael Avenatti, who rose to Democratic stardom for his defense of Stormy Daniels — but is now sentenced to 14 years in federal prison for stealing money from his clients. There’s also Sam Brinton, the nonbinary former Biden administration nuclear official whose hiring was touted as a historic moment by the Biden administration, only for him to be later charged with felony suitcase theft and pleaded guilty to petit larceny.

Nonetheless, Democrats do not seem to have learned their lesson. Several Democrats traveled to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia, including Senator Chris Van Hollen.

Senator Joaquín Castro (D., Ariz.) argued Abrego Garcia “had a legal right to be in America.”

“He’s a husband, father and working man. Not a criminal. Yet he was deported to a gulag in El Salvador with no due process and Presidents Trump and Bukele refuse to return him to his family in the U.S. We stood with his family today to demand Kilmar’s return,” he said earlier this month.

CBS reporting offered a similar narrative:

The Atlantic first introduced Abrego Garcia to readers as a “Maryland father” in an article that left out entirely his wife’s allegations of domestic abuse and DHS’s suspicion that he had engaged in human trafficking.

“I don’t understand why the American left falls in love with the worst people,” CNN commentator Scott Jennings said on Thursday. “You’ve got a gangbanging, human-trafficking, wife-beating, illegal alien; and a United States senator, in a ludicrous display of energy, is in El Salvador having Mai Tais and Yahtzee.”

“He has an adjudicated deportation order, and you have Democrat public officials falling all over themselves trying to get him back here without thinking through the next step, which is, he’s literally going to be deported somewhere else,” Jennings said.

At least one Democratic strategist is warning his party not to make a “martyr” of Abrego Garcia.

During an appearance on CNN’s The Arena with Kasie Hunt, strategist Mo Elleithee told Democrats that they “don’t know all of the details about this guy.”

“Let’s not make him a martyr. Let’s make this about the fact that Donald Trump and his administration are chipping away at our rights on a daily basis,” Elleithee said.

But despite all the nuances in Abrego Garcia’s situation, former MSNBC host Chris Matthews claims President Trump’s handling of Abrego Garcia’s deportation has striking similarities to how Adolf Hitler behaved during the Holocaust.

“What did Hitler do in the Holocaust? He took people from Germany to other countries,” Matthews said during an appearance on The Jim Acosta Show podcast. “Where there was no German law. There was not even a pretense of German law, they took them to Poland or Hungary, and they kill them.”

Acosta asked: “And so when you see what’s happening right now with this El Salvadoran Gulag, I mean, this CECOT Gulag, he’s basically taking a page out of that playbook, you think?”

Matthews replied, “Well it gets them out of the country.”

Back on MSNBC, host Symone Sanders-Townsend warned that people of color will be next to be deported by the Trump administration.

“But to me, that is why Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s specific case, the case of the gentleman who’s a make-up artist out of California who was also sent to that prison— the 75 percent of the folks who have been sent, the men who have been sent there that don’t have criminal records — that is why this is so important,” she said.

“Because if they can do it to them, if they can snatch students off the street without any pushback or recourse, they will do it to any of us,” she added. “To be very clear, it’s going to be the people of color, and vulnerable communities that are next in line.”

Representative Glenn Ivey (D., Md.) agreed with Sanders-Townsend.

“I think that’s right,” he began. “That’s certainly part of why the African-American community is so strongly behind supporting Kilmar.”

Headline Fail of the Week

“Bad News for Man’s Best Friend: Dogs Are Environmental Villains,” reports Mother Jones.

The article cites an Australian review that found “the environmental impact of owned dogs is far greater, more insidious, and more concerning than is generally recognised.”

The study found dogs impact the environment in a number of ways, including disturbing wildlife, polluting waterways and contributing to carbon emissions.

Media Misses