The Supreme Court has ruled Donald Trump’s administration must return to the U.S. a wrongfully deported Maryland father imprisoned in a brutal El Salvador jail.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia last month despite a court order that blocked his removal from the country. Administration officials conceded he was sent to El Salvador in “error,” but insisted it was impossible to bring him back.
Last week, a federal judge ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia after government attorneys admitted he was wrongfully deported due to an “administrative errorn” but argued that the case was no longer in their hands.
Trump appealed to the nation’s highest court hours before a midnight deadline to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Chief Justice John Roberts then issued a single-page order that paused the lower court’s order as the justices considered the case.
In their response to Trump’s appeal, lawyers for Abrego Garcia said he “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
The president “may not seize individuals from the streets, deposit them in foreign prisons in violation of court orders, and then invoke the separation of powers to insulate its unlawful actions from judicial scrutiny,” they wrote.
The administration sent Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s mega prison — which human rights groups have derided as a “tropical gulag” — on March 15. He joined dozens of mostly Venezuelan immigrants on removal flights after the president secretly invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members.
One of those planes allegedly carried immigrants with court orders for their removal, not under the president’s wartime authority. Abrego Garcia was on that plane — something administration officials have called an “oversight” — even though there were no orders for his removal from the United States.
In 2019, a judge blocked Abrego Garcia’s removal from the U.S. after his credible testimony that he fears violence and death in El Salvador, from which he fled as a teenager in 2011.
Under that American court order, Abrego Garcia is allowed to live and work in the United States, but must attend regular check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His most recent appearance was in January, according to court documents.
Abrego Garcia has no criminal record in either the United States or El Salvador, according to his attorney. He has been living in Maryland with his wife and 5-year-old child — both U.S. citizens — and helping raise two children from a previous relationship.
After he was granted humanitarian protections, Abrego Garcia found work as a sheet-metal worker and enrolled in a five-year licensing program with the University of Maryland as he helped his three children, including his young son, who was diagnosed with autism.
Despite admitting the “error,” government lawyers have fought to keep him imprisoned.
Following news of the government’s admission in court filings last week, Vice President JD Vance falsely labeled Abrego Garcia a “convicted gang member.” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted there was a “clerical error” in his case, but claimed, without providing evidence, that Garcia was a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and “involved in human trafficking.”
