The Trump administration conceded in a court filing Wednesday that it had deported a Maryland father to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador as a result of an “administrative error,” The Atlantic first reported. But now that he’s in foreign custody, officials claim, they cannot be compelled to do anything to bring him back.
The father and Salvadoran national, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019 after ICE officials tried to deport him. At the time, ICE had claimed that he was a high-ranking member of MS-13, a Salvadoran criminal gang. Garcia disputed those charges and appealed for asylum over fears that he would be killed or tortured by gang members targeting him for extortion.
The judge’s order prohibited the federal government from sending Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador, but that didn’t stop the Trump administration from seeking to deport him.
On March 12, immigration agents told Abrego Garcia that his status had changed. Three days later, he was put on one of three planes destined for El Salvador, leaving behind his wife and five-year-old son, both U.S. citizens. According to court documents, the ICE agents who deported him knew that his protected status was still active.
A lawsuit by Abrego Garcia’s representatives prompted the Trump administration to admit, for the first time, that it had committed a grave error.
“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 filing states.
Two of the planes were sent to El Salvador under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act, which has been used by the Trump administration to expel immigrants it has accused of being members of the street gang Tren de Aragua. But Abrego Garcia himself was on a third plane that was only supposed to transport immigrants with formal deportation orders signed by a judge.
Now his lawyers fear that Abrego Garcia faces torture in CECOT, a prison widely documented by human rights watchdogs, and flaunted by both the Trump administration and Salvadoran government, as a “black hole of human rights.”
Justice Department lawyers have argued that because Abrego Garcia is now in foreign custody, there is nothing they can do to effect his return, and asked the judge to reject his family’s petition to bring him home. Vice President JD Vance defended the administration’s decision, falsely claiming in a social media post that Abrego Garcia was “a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.”
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