Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a lawful U.S. resident, is now separated from family and in the custody of a foreign government due to the Trump administration’s apparent “administrative error”
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The Trump administration has admitted to mistakenly deporting a Maryland father to an El Salvador mega prison on March 15, but claims it now lacks the power to reverse the “administrative error.”
A court filing from March 31 sheds light on details surrounding the apparently accidental deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old immigrant who fled gang violence in El Salvador as a teenager and earned legal protected status in the States.
While the federal government acknowledges in the filing that it did not intend to detain Abrego Garcia, Trump officials insist that they no longer have the authority to reunite him with his family.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, petitioned a U.S. court to order that the Trump administration facilitate his client’s return and refuse payment to El Salvador’s government. The U.S. is reportedly paying El Salvador millions to house deported detainees at the infamous CECOT prison.
In response to the filing, lawyers for the Trump administration moved for the request to be thrown out, citing President Donald Trump‘s power to determine foreign affairs as more important and stating that the U.S. does not have jurisdiction to recall Abrego Garcia from a foreign state’s custody.
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The court filing lists a number of Trump administration officials as defendants, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who recently made a controversial visit to the CECOT mega prison for social media content and posed in front of a cell full of prisoners.
“[Trump officials] claim that the court is powerless to order any relief. If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless — all of them — because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Atlantic.
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The Trump administration rendered Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error.” The filing states Abrego Garcia was stopped on March 12 by ICE, “who informed him that his immigration status had changed,” though this was untrue.
He was interrogated about possible gang affiliations, then detained in Texas.
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Abrego Garcia’s family has had no contact with him since his March 15 detention, the court filing claims — and Abrego Garcia’s wife was only able to discern his whereabouts based on photos released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, which showed her husband’s tattoos and head scars.
