A Maryland man’s deportation is under scrutiny after the Trump administration revealed in court filings Monday night that it sent him to a maximum security prison in El Salvador by mistake.
Kilmer Abrego-Garcia’s deportation was an irreversible “administrative error,” the government said, after Abrego-Garcia’s attorney asked a court to order the Trump administration to return him to the United States.
White House officials have since defended the deportation, saying the mistake was trivial because Abrego-Garcia is a Salvadoran national who could have been deported anyway because he had no legal status in the U.S. and allegedly has ties to the MS-13 gang.
Vice President JD Vance called the deportee a “convicted MS-13 gang member” and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said he was an “MS-13 ring leader” who was “also engaged in human trafficking.”
What is Abrego-Garcia’s background?
Abrego-Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the country illegally around 2012 and settled in Maryland, where his older brother lived.
He has worked in construction since living in the U.S. and is a full-time sheet metal apprentice, according to his attorney.
In 2019, Abrego-Garcia married a U.S. citizen who had two children from a previous marriage. The pair had a third child who is now 5 years old and has been diagnosed with autism.
When was he first detained?
Abrego-Garcia was apprehended with three others at a Home Depot in March 2019 and appeared before an immigration judge for a bond hearing the following month.
At the time, the Department of Homeland Security alleged he was affiliated with MS-13 and that he was a danger to the community and should remain detained.
DHS presented two forms that documented that an informant alleged Abrego-Garcia was a gang member. The immigration judge determined the forms were reliable enough to keep him in detention.
Why was Abrego-Garcia released in 2019?
While he was in detention, he applied for asylum and for a status known as “withholding of removal,” saying a local gang called Barrio 18 has long been tormenting him and his family in El Salvador because of his parents’ former lucrative papusa business.
An immigration judge denied his asylum claim because it was outside the one-year limit that migrants have to make the claim upon entering the U.S.
The judge did, however, grant Abrego-Garcia withholding of removal on Oct. 10, 2019, saying he established that “it was more likely than not that he would be persecuted by gangs in El Salvador because of a protected ground.”
The judge released him from custody, ruling that he was not to be deported to El Salvador and that he must check in with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement annually. Abrego-Garcia’s attorney said he has been fully compliant with that order.
Is he a ‘convicted’ MS-13 gang member?
Abrego-Garcia has never been charged or convicted of any crime in the U.S. or any other country, his attorney said.
The immigration judge presiding over his bond hearing said, however, that DHS had a reliable informant who verified his “gang membership, rank, and gang name” and that the information was “sufficient to support that the Respondent is a gang member.”
That finding is not a criminal conviction but rather an observation that an immigration judge within the Department of Justice made in determining that Abrego-Garcia should be denied bond while he was being detained for living in the country illegally.
Abrego-Garcia has vehemently denied any affiliation with MS-13 and said in court filings that he has never been presented with evidence, aside from the informant’s accusation and a note about him wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, that he could refute. He said he has asked multiple local and federal agencies for it.
“The U.S. government has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation,” his attorney wrote.
Why was he erroneously deported to El Salvador?
Trump administration officials touted that they deported three planes’ worth of Venezuelan and Salvadoran gang members on March 15 to El Salvador to be held in the country’s infamous terrorism confinement center known as CECOT.
The first two planes, according to an ICE official named Robert Cerna, deported alleged Tren de Aragua members in response to President Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that gives the president the power to bypass all other immigration rules to deport people immediately. Cerna said Abrego-Garcia was on the third flight.
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The Alien Enemies Act only applied to Venezuelan Tren de Aragua members, but in a separate court case challenging Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, Cerna stated that “all individuals on that third plane had Title 8 final removal orders and thus were not removed solely on the basis” of the act.
Abrego-Garcia could have appeared before an immigration judge who could have ordered him deported, but his attorney said his client was improperly denied the ability to go through that process.
