The court fight over Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a most unusual one in that no one denies that the government violated the law in deporting him.

Abrego Garcia, a national of El Salvador who was here illegally, was removed from the United States along with alleged Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members from Venezuela who were deported to a Salvadoran prison in a rush last month. While the administration invoked the Alien Enemy Act as to the Venezuelans and similarly deported them without due process (erroneously so, according to the Supreme Court), it claimed based on scant evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 — another vicious international criminal enterprise that the administration has designated as a foreign terrorist organization. Inevitably, skipping ordinary procedural checks, the administration made at least one mistake in deporting Abrego Garcia, and probably many others.

Abrego Garcia is deportable, and should be deported, but a judge had ruled, in connection with 2019 proceedings over his time-barred asylum claim, that he couldn’t be sent to El Salvador. Sure enough, we sent him to El Salvador, and not just anywhere in that Latin American country but to the most notorious prison in the Western Hampshire, the so-called Terrorist Confinement Center, or CECOT.

This is an obvious injustice that could be easily remedied by bringing Abrego Garcia back. The administration maintains that this is impossible because it sent him to a foreign jail run by the government of El Salvador, not the United States. This is a ridiculous pretense because the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, will clearly do anything we ask. If the deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America requested that he ride a unicycle wrapped in an American flag in San Salvador’s central square, Bukele would probably ask whether it should be a Betsy Ross flag or the traditional Stars and Stripes.

In the litigation over the matter, a district court ordered the administration to “effectuate” the return of Abrego Garcia. The administration objected that this directive interfered with its power to conduct foreign policy. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the district court can indeed order the Trump administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, while clarifying that its use of “effectuate” is not meant to intrude unnecessarily on the president’s foreign affairs power. The Court added that the administration must be forthcoming with the judge regarding the steps it is taking along those lines — rather than refusing to provide information, as it did during last week’s hearing. The Court was not entirely clear on how much substance there is to the difference between “effectuate” and “facilitate.”

Whether his return is effectuated or facilitated, it should happen. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million to hold detainees for a year, after which we will determine their disposition. So, we have functional control of the detainees, however inconvenient it is for the Trump administration to admit that at the moment.

Abrego Garcia’s claim that he fears persecution from another gang in El Salvador is likely bogus. This, along with the government’s sketchy claim that he is a member of MS-13, should all be sorted out via a lawful process here in the United States. The administration can bring him back the easy and correct way — as soon as possible — or play a losing hand in the courts while someone we never should have sent there sweats out his days in CECOT.