The Trump administration has admitted that it mistakenly sent a Salvadoran immigrant to a supermax El Salvador prison despite the man having a U.S. court order that prevented him from being sent there due to fear of persecution.
Justice Department officials in a federal court filing Monday, dismissed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison as an “administrative 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,” they wrote.
“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,” Robert Cerna, an acting field office director with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, wrote in a separate court filing.
Despite the error, the Trump administration argued that because Abrego Garcia is no longer in U.S. custody, the court cannot bring him back due to a lack of jurisdiction. It also argued that his family, which includes his U.S. citizen wife and 5-year-old child in Maryland, “have not clearly shown a likelihood that Abrego Garcia will be tortured or killed in CECOT.”
“More fundamentally, this Court should defer to the government’s determination that Abrego Garcia will not likely be tortured or killed in El Salvador,” it concluded.
The response follows Abrego Garcia’s family in the U.S. filing a lawsuit last week on his behalf that denies his ties to MS-13, “or any other criminal or street gang,” and demands his return to the U.S.
“Although he has been accused of general ‘gang affiliation,’ the U.S. government has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation,” the lawsuit states. It further argues that he has never been charged or convicted of any crime, in the U.S., El Salvador or elsewhere.
Weighing in Tuesday, Vice President JD Vance posted on X that Abrego Garcia is a “convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here,” though Abrego Garcia was never convicted of being a gang member, according to the court documents.
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According to the documents, a U.S. judge denied Abrego Garcia bond from detention in 2019 after hearing a confidential informant’s claim to ICE that he was a gang member. A judge later determined him to be removable from the country, but granted him an order of protection that prevented him from being sent back to El Salvador due to his fear of being persecuted there or tortured.
He shortly after was released from ICE custody, only to be rearrested on March 12 of this year, again because of his alleged role in MS-13. He was then put on a plane to El Salvador, despite the flight being “designed to only include individuals with no impediments to removal,” said Cerna.