The Trump administration accidentally sent a Salvadorian immigrant to a notorious Salvadorian prison and says it can’t do anything to get him back.
That’s even though the man had protected immigration status in the U.S., specifically barring him from being sent back to that country for fear of persecution.
On Monday, in a filing in Maryland federal court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to mistakenly sending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT prison.
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government wrote.
The admission came in a suit from Abrego Garcia’s family, who is seeking court orders barring the U.S. from paying El Salvador for the man’s detention and demanding that the federal government request the country return him to the United States.
The Trump administration argues that because the man is no longer in U.S. custody, a U.S. court lacks jurisdiction to issue orders regarding his detention and release.
The Atlantic magazine first reported on the case.
Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. without inspection sometime around 2011 from El Salvador and settled in Maryland, fleeing from gangs in his home country who allegedly stalked, assaulted, and threatened to kill and kidnap him as part of extortion efforts, according to court documents.
In 2019, removal proceedings began against the man. At a bond hearing that year, ICE accused him of being a member of the Salvadorian criminal gang MS-13, citing information that stemmed from a 2019 arrest with a group of men outside a Maryland Home Depot. The arrest resulted in no charges.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argue police deemed the man a gang member on weak evidence, including a claim from a confidential informant Abrego Garcia was a member of an MS-13 clique from a state he’d never lived in, and the fact that Abrego Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat at the time of his arrest.
His attorneys maintain he has no criminal record, ties to the gang, or relation to any criminal group.
During the removal proceedings, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and a judge granted him withholding from removal. The government did not appeal the decision.
The Maryland man, a union sheet metal working apprentice and father to a 5-year-old, remained in the U.S. and continued regular mandated check-ins with ICE, according to court documents, appearing most recently in January.
“Instead, the government put Mr. Abrego Garcia on a plane to El Salvador, seemingly without any pretense of a legal basis whatsoever,” his attorneys wrote in their suit, filed on Friday. “Once in El Salvador, that country’s government immediately placed Mr. Abrego Garcia into a torture center — one that the U.S. government is reportedly paying the government of El Salvador to operate. This grotesque display of power without law is abhorrent to our entire system of justice, and must not be allowed to stand.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
“The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang — we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement to The Independent. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he should be locked up. Remarkable that The Atlantic and other MSM continue to do the bidding of these vicious gangs and ignore their victims.”
On Wednesday, March 12, Abrego Garcia learned his immigration status had changed, and he was sent to El Salvador by Saturday.
CECOT is the same facility, dubbed a “tropical gulag” by some human rights groups, where the Trump administration sent hundreds of Venezuelans it alleges to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang, using emergency powers under the wartime Alien Enemies Act to remove the men without full court proceedings.
Multiple individuals who were among the hundreds removed from the country this month as part of the operation appear to have been deported for having tattoos with relatively common motifs, including the Air Jordan logo, a crown, a star, and a rainbow autism awareness symbol.
The administration has acknowledged that “many” of the over 200 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador did not have a prior criminal record.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday conceded that the Venezuelans were not all necessarily members of Tren de Aragua, either. He called the group a “combination of people” whose presence is “not productive to the United States” and who were “removable” by law.
Further adding to the controversy over the deportations, the Trump administration carried out the flights on March 15 despite a court order telling the administration to turn the planes around, amid an ongoing lawsuit over the White House’s use of the wartime deportation law.
On Friday, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to weigh in and allow them to resume such flights, arguing the president’s national security powers are being wrongly infringed.
