Summary:
The Trump administration accidentally sent a Salvadorian immigrant to a notorious Salvadorian prison and says it can’t do anything to get him back.
That’s even though the man had protected immigration status in the U.S., specifically barring him from being sent back to that country for fear of persecution.
On Monday, in a filing in Maryland federal court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to mistakenly sending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT prison.
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government wrote.
The admission came in a suit from Abrego Garcia’s family, who is seeking court orders barring the U.S. from paying El Salvador for the man’s detention and demanding that the federal government request the country return him to the United States.
The Trump administration argues that because the man is no longer in U.S. custody, a U.S. court lacks jurisdiction to issue orders regarding his detention and release. U.S. claims it can’t seek man’s freedom from notorious Salvadorian prison because it no longer has custody over him U.S. claims it can’t seek man’s freedom from notorious Salvadorian prison because it no longer has custody over him (AP)
Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. without inspection sometime around 2011 from El Salvador and settled in Maryland, fleeing from gangs in his home country who allegedly stalked, assaulted, and threatened to kill and kidnap him as part of extortion efforts, according to court documents.
In 2019, he was given a notice to appear in removal proceedings, where ICE accused him of being a member of the Salvadorian criminal gang MS-13.
His attorneys maintain he has no criminal record, ties to the gang, or relation to any criminal group. They claim the accusation rests on a flimsy gang arrest when he was targeted by police for little more than wearing Chicago Bulls-branded clothing while seeking work outside a Home Depot. (ICE maintains that a confidential informant told the agency the man was a member of MS-13.)
During the removal proceedings, Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and protection under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and a judge granted him withholding from removal. The government did not appeal the decision.
The Maryland man, a union sheet metal working apprentice and father to a 5-year-old, remained in the U.S. and continued regular mandated check-ins with ICE, according to court documents, appearing most recently in January.
“Instead, the government put Mr. Abrego Garcia on a plane to El Salvador, seemingly without any pretense of a legal basis whatsoever,” his attorneys wrote in their suit, filed on Friday. “Once in El Salvador, that country’s government immediately placed Mr. Abrego Garcia into a torture center — one that the U.S. government is reportedly paying the government of El Salvador to operate. This grotesque display of power without law is abhorrent to our entire system of justice, and must not be allowed to stand.”
My understanding is that Trump’s guys are arguing that the court has no authority to order them to return this guy, not that he can’t be returned. In other words, now that he’s out of the country, his situation is foreign policy rather than American legal proceedings.
Agreed - I’m somewhat disappointed in the toned down language in the article - “accidentally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that headline, and “can’t get him back” should be “refuses to even try to get him back.”
Yea. If we had a proper president, we could get him back. Three step program.
1 Ask them to send him back.
2 Park a CBG off their coast, just inside their territorial waters.
3 Ask them to send him back, or else.
Might not be a great idea, in terms of ongoing international relations, but we would get our guy back.
I don’t think a court could reasonably order the government to threaten another country like that - a judge doesn’t get to make such major foreign-policy decisions. My very basic understanding is that the government is saying that, according to this principle, a court can’t order it to make any foreign policy decisions. (Otherwise who gets to decide what foreign-policy decisions is major?)
The government is clearly in the wrong here morally, and letting them do this would seem to authorize a lot of abhorrent behavior. (Can the government have anything they want done to you without recourse as long as they take you to a foreign country and pay that country’s agents to do it?) Still, as a matter of legal principle this isn’t entirely straightforward.
I’m not seeing it as a court order. I’m directly addressing the claim that Trump can’t do anything to get him back.
I don’t think that’s a claim that the Trump administration is actually making, even though it’s in the title of the article. Here’s what the article quotes them saying:
I agree. I made the comment before I read the rest of the article.
Headline writers need to be flogged, or something.
Ah, then I don’t think we disagree. Still, the CBG might be overkill when a simple phone call would have sufficed. After all, they don’t want him. We’re paying them to keep him.
Then again, since we’re already threatening Canada and Greenland, maybe we should threaten El Salvador too? We can accuse them of imprisoning residents of other countries who were sent to them extralegally without a trial or any other sort of official procedure. It’s unethical! They would be so confused.
Oh so you are saying Trump is too weak to deal with El Salvador
There are certain things that a court can’t (Constitutionally) order you to do, like letting soldiers live in your house during peacetime. That’s true even if you’re alone in a huge mansion and housing those soldiers would be trivially easy for you.
Shouldn’t that be the next step?
That’s not exactly ICE’s argument. Their argument, as I understand it, is that the judge doesn’t have the authority to order the feds to do that.
Consider a similar but more sympathetic example. The government accidentally releases information which reveals the identity of an American agent working in a foreign country, and that agent is arrested. The agent’s family sues the government, arguing that the judge should order the government to carry out a prisoner exchange. The government says that revealing the agent’s identity was a mistake, but now undoing that mistake would require negotiations with a foreign country and such negotiations are not something that a court can order the government to carry out. The government’s argument in such a case would seem reasonable to me.
It’s funny how when the court blocks something Trump wants to do but here is can’t do anything.
Is Trump scared of El Salvador? He tried to bully Canada, Greenland, UK, Europe, and many more.
We’re paying for El Salvador to take these people, we can pay to get them out. This is the Trump admin basically boasting about violating the law and ruining lives.
This only gets better if the guilty members of the government get locked up for contempt for ignoring the court’s original order. Only then, especially if it gets Signalgate attention, may they start to cave. I realize it’s unlikely, but it’s not a 0% chance yet.