Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia may finally be reunited with his family a month after he was deported over an "administrative error.”
In a unanimous ruling on Thursday, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of the Maryland man who was erroneously deported to a prison in El Salvador.
All nine jurors upheld a district court ruling demanding his return, acknowledging his deportation to the Center for Terrorism Confinement, or CECOT, was unlawful.
“The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal …was therefore illegal,” the order read, adding that the ruling “requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”
The court also instructed the Trump administration to “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
In a partial concurrence, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made it clear that she would have shot down the government’s request to appeal the lower court ruling entirely, making the Thursday ruling unnecessary.
“To this day, the Government has cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Government now requests an order from this Court permitting it to leave Abrego Garcia, a husband and father without a criminal record, in a Salvadoran prison for no reason recognized by the law.”
The justices’ stances on the matter could come into play in other cases surrounding deportations to CECOT, the infamous prison holding nearly 300 Venezuelan deportees from the United States. D.C. District Judge James Boasberg had been hearing challenges to Trump's use of the Alien Enemies Act to facilitate such removals before the high court punted the case to the notoriously conservative Southern District of Texas instead.
