Donald Trump’s administration acknowledged on Monday in court documents that a Maryland man with protected status was deported to El Salvador and blamed an “administrative error”.
The administration also said it is unable to bring him back because US courts lack jurisdiction now that he is in Salvadoran custody.
The man, Kilmer Armado Abrego-Garcia, is a Salvadoran national who resided in Maryland with his wife and their five-year-old child.
Abrego-Garcia, who has had protected legal status since 2019, is currently detained at Cecot, the notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, after he was deported by the Trump administration on 15 March.
In the court filing, Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys said that Ice had initially attempted to deport him in 2019. At the time, immigration officials claimed that a confidential informant had told them that Abrego-Garcia “was an active member of the criminal gang MS-13”, an accusation that he has denied.
That year, Abrego-Garcia contested the claims and efforts to deport him and filed an application for asylum.
According to the court filing, Abrego-Garcia was granted “withholding of removal to El Salvador” by an immigration judge in October 2019, a protected status that prevents an individual being returned to their home country if they can show that there’s a “more likely than not” risk that they will be harmed.
But last month, on 12 March, Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys say that he was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who they say “informed him that his immigration status had changed”.
Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys said in the filing that “Ice was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador”.
“After being detained, he was questioned about gang affiliations and transferred ultimately to a detention center in Texas,” the court filing states – and then deported to El Salvador on 15 March. He was deported on the third of three deportation flights to the country that took place that day, which are now at the center of an intense legal battle in which the Trump administration has been ordered to demonstrate how it did not violate a federal judge’s halt on the flights.
His deportation was first reported on Monday by The Atlantic.
“Abrego-Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the filing states.
Then on Monday, acting Ice field office director Robert Cerna described the deportation in a court declaration as “an error”. He said that Abrego-Garcia was “not on the initial manifest of the … flight to be removed to El Salvador” but “rather, he was an alternate”.
As other detainees “were removed from the flight for various reasons”, Abrego-Garcia “moved up the list and was assigned to the flight”, Cerna said.
He added: “The manifest did not indicate that Abrego-Garcia should not be removed.
“Through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. 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.
This removal was an error.”
In the filing, the administration said that it no longer has custody of Abrego-Garcia and therefore does not have ability to bring him back to the US.
Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys wrote that – on 16 March – his wife identified him in a photograph in a news article showing individuals entering Cecot.
Abrego-Garcia’s wife and relatives then filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on his behalf.
In the initial complaint, Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys said that he denied he was a member of any “criminal or street gang” and said that the US government “has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation”.
On Monday night, JD Vance defended the deportation of Abrego-Garcia in a post on X, arguing – without offering evidence – that he had “no legal right to be here”.
Abrego-Garcia’s ordeal is one of several immigration-related episodes to make headlines in the US in recent days.
On Monday, a state judge in Boston dismissed a criminal case against a man who had been detained mid-trial by Ice agents. The judge found that the Ice agent involved had demonstrated “egregious conduct”, was in contempt of court and referred him to local prosecutors, according to Boston 25 News.
The judge said it would be up to prosecutors whether they pursue criminal charges against the agent.
Meanwhile, community members in the Chicago area are rallying in support of two brothers from Venezuela, one of whom was detained by Ice agents. One of the brothers is in need of a kidney transplant, and his sibling was planning to be his donor before Ice detained him, as reported by NBC News.
The detained brother has been in custody for weeks and faces deportation.
Furthermore, over the weekend, a woman from Mexico in Michigan was arrested on immigration-related charges after she went to the police to report that she was assaulted at her job.
According to the Detroit Free Press, immigration officials were not aware that she lived in Michigan until she went to local police in February to report the assault allegation.
