Lawyers for a Maryland man who was inadvertently deported last month to a notorious Salvadoran prison despite an order that he could remain in the United States angrily urged the judge overseeing his case on Wednesday to force the Trump administration to bring him back as soon as possible.
In a court filing, the lawyers for the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, furiously took issue with almost every aspect of the case. To start, they said, Trump officials had acknowledged on Monday night that they had made an “administrative error” by flying Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on March 15 even though a U.S. immigration judge had already determined that he might face torture there.
The lawyers also expressed shock that the administration was maintaining that it had little power to get Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national whose wife and child are both American citizens, out of custody. The prison where he is being held, known as CECOT, has long had a reputation of having brutal conditions.
“Defendants have already washed their hands of plaintiff, of his U.S.-citizen wife, of his autistic nonverbal five-year-old U.S.-citizen child,” the lawyers wrote. “Defendants’ proposed resolution of this state of affairs, which they caused either intentionally or at best recklessly, is nothing at all. This is an outrageous set of facts.”
The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is the latest flashpoint in a multifront and increasingly bitter battle between immigration lawyers and the White House, which in recent weeks has been escalating its efforts to deport hundreds of migrants using both traditional and highly unorthodox methods.
The case has raised questions not only about how a man whom a judge had granted permission to remain in the United States could have ended up on a plane to El Salvador, but also about why the Trump administration has apparently done nothing to correct its mistake.
Moreover, the matter, which is unfolding in Federal District Court in Maryland, has put a spotlight on the administration’s description of Mr. Abrego Garcia as a member of MS-13, the violent Salvadoran street gang, an accusation for which there is limited evidence and that he himself denies.
Not long after Mr. Abrego Garcia was detained by the local police in March 2019 while looking for employment at a Home Depot in Hyattsville, Md., officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement tried to have him deported.
During those proceedings, the officials accused him of being a member of MS-13, citing two pieces of evidence: an accusation from a confidential informant who told them Mr. Abrego Garcia belonged to the gang, and the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, which the officials said was further proof of his gang membership.
Mr. Abrego Garcia appealed the deportation effort and filed for asylum, claiming his life would be in danger if he were sent back to El Salvador. In October 2019, an immigration judge granted him a status known as “withholding from removal,” which protected him from deportation.
But last month Mr. Abrego Garcia was stopped again by immigration agents, who inaccurately told him that his protected status had changed. Within days, he had been placed on one of three flights to El Salvador that the Trump administration had hastily arranged as it was beginning to use a rarely invoked wartime statute, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelans accused of being members of a different street gang, Tren de Aragua.
Two of the planes were sent to El Salvador under the authority of the wartime act, administration officials have said. But the third — the one on which Mr. Abrego Garcia was traveling — was supposed to have been transporting only migrants with formal removal orders signed by a judge.
The Trump administration now admits that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s removal was an “oversight” but has urged the judge overseeing the case, Paula Xinis, to reject his family’s petition to bring him home. Officials have claimed that the White House cannot force the Salvadoran government to release him and that U.S. federal courts have no jurisdiction to order his release.
Judge Xinis is scheduled to hold a hearing on Friday to discuss the deportation. In advance of the proceeding, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers told her that it was inconceivable that Trump officials had done nothing to get him back even though prior administrations, they maintain, had worked quickly to win the return of people who had been removed in error.
The lawyers have asked Judge Xinis to order the administration to win their client’s release by “financial pressure and diplomacy.” But the Justice Department, appearing to throw its hands up, responded this week that there is simply no evidence that the Salvadoran government would agree to releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia for any amount of money or would consider freeing him even if the administration asked.
In what appeared to be a preview of arguments they will raise in court this week, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers also claimed that the case touched on broader issues of the rule of law and trust in government authority.
“In the end, the public interest is best served by restoring the supremacy of laws over power,” they wrote. “The Department of Homeland Security must obey the orders of the immigration courts, or else such courts become meaningless. Noncitizens — and their U.S.-citizen spouses and children — must know that if this nation awards them a grant protection from persecution, it will honor that commitment even when the political winds shift.”
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. More about Alan Feuer
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