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The federal government has admitted that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported a Maryland man to El Salvador due to an “administrative error,” and argued to a judge that there is little that U.S. courts can do to seek his release because he is no longer in U.S. custody.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with legal status, was arrested on March 12 when ICE officers pulled him over with his 5-year-old son, who is autistic and intellectually disabled, in the back seat, his lawyers said in a court filing last week.
During his arrest, ICE officers told Abrego Garcia that his “status has changed,” his lawyers said in the filing. The officers told him to call his wife to pick up their son, and his wife was given no explanation “as to why her husband was detained, where he was going, or what was happening,” the filing reads. His lawyers say Abrego Garcia appeared to have been moved to “various different locations across the country” from the day of his arrest until March 15, when he was deported.
According to his lawyers, Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador for the U.S. in 2011 due to gang violence. In 2019, he was granted a “withholding of removal” order that protected him from being returned to his home country after an immigration judge determined that he would likely be persecuted by gangs there. During those proceedings, his lawyers say, ICE accused him of being part of the MS-13 gang on the basis of a police department report that noted his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and cited an unidentified informant who linked Abrego Garcia to an MS-13 division that operates in a state he has never lived in.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argue that he “is not a member of or has no affiliation with Tren de Aragua, MS-13, or any other criminal or street gang. 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.”
In a court filing Monday, the Justice Department pointed to the allegation of gang affiliation in Abrego Garcia’s 2019 immigration proceedings but conceded that he was deported despite the protective order “because of an administrative error.” Federal prosecutors also asked the judge to deny the motion to order Abrego Garcia’s release, arguing that the court has no jurisdiction because he is no longer in U.S. custody and it cannot compel the Salvadoran government to release him.
The Trump administration has deported hundreds of people to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. Lawyers and family members say that many of those sent there do not have criminal records and have been falsely accused of gang affiliations because of their tattoos. Abrego Garcia is also currently imprisoned at CECOT; according to his lawyer, Abrego Garcia’s wife recognized him from prison footage.
Despite the admission of error by DOJ officials, Vice President JD Vance defended Abrego Garcia’s removal in posts on X Tuesday. Vance claimed that Abrego Garcia was “a convicted MS-13 gang member” (Abrego Garcia’s lawyers note he has no convictions) and accused the media of running “a propaganda operation” around the case.
When asked what evidence Vance had to claim Abrego Garcia had been “convicted,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday that the Department of Homeland Security and ICE have “a lot of evidence” and that she herself “saw it this morning.” She did not elaborate on what the evidence was or why it had not been presented to the court.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, denied allegations his client is a member of MS-13, telling NBC News in response to Vance’s posts that the “only basis of his gang membership was a confidential informant, there was never any hard and fast proof.”
Federal authorities circumvented the judicial process in Abrego Garcia’s case, Sandoval-Moshenberg added.
“They could have gone back to the judge who in 2019 gave him an order of protection and could have asked that judge to lift that order,” he said. “They didn’t do that, they just put him on an airplane.”