The Trump administration has admitted that it mistakenly deported a man to a notorious prison in El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” despite the government’s repeated insistence that there were no errors in their flight determinations.
A sworn statement filed late Tuesday from a top Immigration and Customs official said that the removal of Kilmer Armado Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorean national, had been the result of an “administrative error.”
In 2019, Abrego Garcia was arrested, and although he was not charged with anything, he was served a notice to appear at removal proceedings. At the time, Abrego Garcia was denied bond because a confidential informant advised that he was a member of MS-13, according to the filing. No actual evidence of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership was provided. He was not, as Vice President JD Vance suggested on X, a “convicted” member of MS-13.
Abrego Garcia then filed an I-589 application for asylum, withholding of removal, and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture. He had come to the U.S. in 2011, fleeing threats of gang violence at the age of 16, according to The Atlantic.
Although he was found to be removable, the immigration judge granted him a “withholding of removal,” a protected legal status meaning he could not be deported to El Slavador, where he would likely become a target for gang violence.
Abrego Garcia was released from custody and has been living in Maryland with his wife and five-year-old child, who is disabled. He and his wife work full-time to support their family.
Robert Cerna, an acting field office director at the Harlingnen Field Office in Texas, where the flights ferrying 261 alleged gang members to El Salvador were staged, said in a statement that Abrego Garcia should not have been included in the flight manifest, and that ICE was well aware of the hold on his removal, as it was referred to on internal forms.
Still, Abrego Garcia was included as an “alternate” for removal, Cerna said. “As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. The manifest did not indicate that Abrego-Garcia should not be removed.”
“Through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13.”
A judge denied his family’s request for an injunction because the U.S. no longer has custody of Abrego Garcia, who now wrongfully sits in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights abuses.
Vance went on the defensive Tuesday morning, repeatedly claiming in posts on X that an immigration judge had determined that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but again he got his facts wrong.
“In 2019, an Immigration Judge (under the Biden administration) determined that the deported man was, in fact, a member of the MS-13 gang,” Vance wrote, apparently forgetting that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, was president from 2016-2020.
“He also apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court. A real winner,” Vance continued, as if that somehow made Abrego Garcia a worthy candidate for torture and gang violence.
The post Trump Team Admits They Deported an Innocent Man—and They Don’t Care appeared first on New Republic.
