Maria Jose Flores Garcia, a 19-year-old University of Maryland freshman, and her mother, Mirna Aracely Garcia Cabrera, are being held at an immigration detention center in Louisiana after immigration officers arrested them Nov. 5 at a routine check-in in Baltimore. Both hold an immigration judge’s order that bars the government from deporting them to El Salvador. Murray Osorio PLLC began representing them after their arrest.
Flores Garcia came to the United States from El Salvador in 2016, when she was 9 years old. At Parkdale High School in Prince George’s County she was an International Baccalaureate student, a member of the National Honor Society and a soccer player, and she worked two jobs during the school year. She graduated as valedictorian in May. This fall she started at the University of Maryland on a full-tuition scholarship. She is studying public health and wants to be an emergency room doctor. Neither she nor her mother has a criminal record.
“Maria and her mother did everything the government asked of them,” said Justice Haynes, counsel for Flores Garcia and Garcia Cabrera. “Mirna showed up for her ICE check-ins. Maria worked, graduated first in her class, and started college. They both had a court order protecting them from being sent back to El Salvador. Yet the government detained them at a routine check-in and now plans to send them to Mexico, a country that is not theirs, without letting a judge hear why they are afraid to go. That’s exactly what due process is supposed to prevent. The government doesn’t get to ignore a judge’s order simply by sending someone through another country. We’re asking ICE to let them go home and give them a fair chance to be heard.”
When they first came to the U.S., the government placed Garcia Cabrera and her daughter in removal proceedings, and they asked the immigration court for protection. In 2021, an immigration judge in Baltimore granted both of them protection under the Convention Against Torture, which is available only to people who would more likely than not be tortured if sent back. The Department of Homeland Security did not appeal and has never moved to terminate that protection.
The protection is narrower than asylum and does not lead to permanent residence, but it made them eligible to work legally and gave them the stability to build a life in Maryland. In 2021, it almost always meant a person stayed in the United States. That changed in 2025, when the administration began using third-country removal against people who hold this kind of protection, summarily sending them under a March 2025 Department of Homeland Security policy to countries where they have no ties.
DHS has told reporters that an immigration judge issued a final order of removal against Flores Garcia on Feb. 23, 2021, and that she “will remain in ICE custody pending her removal from the United States.” The order DHS describes is the same decision that protects her. Under immigration law, a judge can only grant this protection together with a removal order. The judge entered that order and, in the same decision, barred the government from carrying it out by sending them to El Salvador.
ICE has told both women it now intends to send them to Mexico, where neither has legal status. Mexico routinely buses Salvadorans deported from the United States back to El Salvador, including people who won protection from return in U.S. immigration court. “The judge’s order says ICE can’t send Maria and Mirna to El Salvador,” Haynes said. “So ICE wants to send them to a country that will.”