To discover how the myth of “Maryland Man” came about, you have to look beyond MS-13 to a far more shocking reality. One of the most powerful pro-illegal alien organizations on the local level in this country was founded in the Terrapin State in the 1980s and has long been run by a committed Central American Marxist radical and at least one ex-El Salvadorian communist guerilla who has taken up arms against US military personnel. And yes, they are still active today.
The false victimhood story surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal alien said to have been “erroneously” deported to a prison hellhole in his native El Salvador, can be traced to the Central American Solidarity Association of Maryland (CASA de Maryland), an “immigrants’ rights” group that has long held outsized influence within the Democratic Party. CASA’s fingerprints are all over the Abrego Garcia saga.
“Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a CASA member, father, and union worker, was torn from his Maryland home and family by [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] – despite a standing court order explicitly protecting him from removal to El Salvador,” CASA of Maryland declared in an April 1 news release. “Kilmar is a husband. A father of three US citizen children. He was building a life when ICE disappeared him into a Salvadoran prison, calling it an ‘administrative error.’”
‘Abducted by the US Government’
It was CASA that trod out Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vazquez Sura, for a public press conference on April 4 to denounce his deportation. “My husband Kilmar was abducted by the US government,” Sura said, surrounded by CASA activists. “In the blink of an eye, our three children lost their father, and I lost the love of my life.”
The story has since unraveled as more details came to light. “First and foremost, he was illegally in our country, he had been illegally in our country. And in 2019, two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court, ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi stated during El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s White House visit on April 14.
Bondi later released documentation revealing that Abrego Garcia held the rank “Chequeo” and the street name “Chele” within MS-13.
Throughout this party-line campaign, major big-box media outlets have used a photo of Abrego Garcia provided by CASA as they diligently worked to amplify the organization’s loaded framing of his deportation.
What Is CASA?
Founded in 1985 in Takoma Park, Maryland, “CASA has come a long way from the church basement it started in,” the group states on its website. “CASA was established by activists opposing US interference in Latin America and the funding of military and paramilitary assaults on the communities of Central America.”
The organization has exploded in size in the years since and now boasts “over 155,000 lifetime members across 46 US states.” But CASA wasn’t just founded by “activists” opposed to the Reagan administration’s efforts to check the expansion of communism in Central America; it is being led by communist revolutionaries right at this moment.
“Gustavo Torres, who left his native Colombia in the 1980s to support the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, has served as CASA’s executive director since 1993,” watchdog website Discover the Networks reports.
“Over the years, Torres has organized public rallies and events in collaboration with a number of radical, pro-open-borders groups such as the American Communist Party; the Free the Cuban Five Committee (which defended a Miami-based, KGB-trained, Castro spy ring whose activities were uncovered by the FBI in September 1998); the Washington, D.C. branch of the FMLN (a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group based in El Salvador); and the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), a radical anti-American organization founded by prominent members of the Salvadoran Communist Party),” Discover the Networks writes in its dossier on CASA.
The Capital Research Center also documents the organization’s communist roots. “CASA de Maryland was founded in the 1980s by a young left-wing activist named Bette ‘Rainbow’ Hoover,” CRC relates. “Hoover [stated] that CASA decided early on to help all comers, including communist guerrillas of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).”
Democrat-run governments in Maryland have shoveled millions of dollars in state money to CASA over the years, Capital Research Center notes. “CASA’s major identified donors have included governments (federal, state, and local), left-wing donor foundations, and Citgo Petroleum,” the CRC’s Influence Watch site details. George Soros’ Open Society Foundations has been a major financial backer. The number of big-brand corporate supporters over the years is far too lengthy to list here.
“Other noteworthy individuals who have been affiliated with CASA over the years include … Cecilia Munoz, a onetime National Council of La Raza president who also served a stint on CASA’s board and Lindolfo Carballo, a frequent CASA spokesman who was once a member of the communist FMLN,” Discover the Networks states.
Munoz is a major name in Democratic Party politics. A former Advisory Board Chair of the Open Society Foundations, “Munoz served as assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council at the White House for five years” during Barack Obama’s administration, her OSF bio read.
“My advisor and friend [Munoz] has been someone I’ve turned to for years,” Obama wrote in a 2020 X post he authored that included a picture of her at work with him in the Oval Office.
Top CASA Maryland Staffer: I Fought Against the US Military
Then there is Lindolfo Carballo. Currently serving as “Senior Director of Community Economic Development Department” for CASA of Maryland, Carballo was featured prominently in July 2024 in the launching of “CASA’s first workers’ cooperative,” a collective “launched in response to the significant challenges immigrant communities face when trying to secure stable, well-paying jobs in industries such as construction, cleaning, childcare services, and food service.”
If the language sounds unmistakably communist, there’s good reason for that. Carballo is, or at one time was, a militant communist. What’s more, he has publicly declared that he once waged war against US military forces.
There is a video on YouTube right now that features Carballo addressing a conference in 2011 and openly stating that he fought against United States military personnel. “I was forced not only to fight back, not only [against] the army in my home country that was armed by this government [the US]. But also the army of this country.”
This is the organization promoting “Maryland Man.” This is what the face of communist subversion looks like. And this is what Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) has attached himself to while making international headlines with his dramatic visit to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia.
Van Hollen: ‘Proud to Work With CASA’
“Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia never should have been abducted and illegally deported,” Van Hollen said in his official statement requesting the meeting. Note how he parroted the wording of CASA of Maryland’s April 1 release.
Van Hollen’s relationship with CASA goes back years – he might even owe his Senate seat to the organization. CASA crucially endorsed Van Hollen in 2016 as he waged an ultra-competitive primary battle to secure the Democratic nomination for the post held by retiring Sen. Barbara Mikulski.
Nayib Bukele (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
“I’ve been proud to work with CASA on so many important issues facing our community – from comprehensive immigration reform to health care to community safety and workforce training,” Van Hollen said in a statement thanking the group for its endorsement. “We’ve made important progress, but there is more to be done to achieve economic opportunity and justice for all.”
“Having worked closely with Chris since 2001, I know he is ready to challenge the status quo to advance justice,” CASA in Action President Gustavo Torres said. Yes, that Gustavo Torres.
Van Hollen has spoken at numerous events hosted by CASA over the years, including a 2021 affair urging the granting of permanent citizenship to El Salvadoran and other Temporary Protected Status aliens from Central America.
It’s mind-numbing to contrast the communist infiltration of the illegal alien movement in Maryland with the state of El Salvador today. What President Bukele has saved his nation from – a deeply corrupt communist government in charge as gang violence exploded – is the very thing Maryland Democrats like Chris Van Hollen have aligned with at CASA.
Here is a history lesson from 2017, two years before Bukele first captured the presidency, courtesy of El Faro, a Central American news site:
“El Salvador in 2009 was already a country with an epidemic of violence, but with some hope: the FMLN ex-guerilla political party had just won the presidency – after 20 years of government from the rightwing ARENA – with a campaign that offered change, similar to the campaign that carried Barack Obama to the White House in 2008.
“Nine years later, these changes did not arrive: the power of the gangs has increased and the FMLN has done the same as ARENA with respect to the state’s finances, the investment in education and the transparency in public governance. The president from ARENA who finished his term in 2009 is in jail; and the president from FMLN who began his term in 2009 is in asylum in Nicaragua, while being accused of corruption in El Salvador. In essence, the country is the same, except in some aspects, where it is worse.”
As the article states, gang violence that was already at catastrophic levels somehow managed to get even worse under FMLN rule. Bukele, never a hardline leftist, actually started his political career with the FMLN before falling out with the party and eventually being expelled. Since becoming president in 2019, he has made it a mission to completely eradicate the FMLN as a political entity, an aim he has largely accomplished.
Since Bukele assumed the presidency, the communist front party has seen its political fortunes dwindle to the brink of collapse. “In only five years, the FMLN went from holding El Salvador’s presidency to garnering a paltry 6% of the vote a month ago as Bukele romped to reelection,” the Associated Press reported in March 2024. “Worse still, for the first time since its inception the FMLN will not have a vote in the Legislative Assembly, having been completely shut out in congressional elections.”
It is astonishing to contemplate, but the former communist guerrillas who once ran El Salvador probably have more political clout in Maryland today than they do in their native country.