Supreme Court Halts Deadline for Return of Mistakenly Deported Man

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has temporarily halted a judge’s demand that the Trump administration bring back a wrongly deported man.

Late Monday, Justice Roberts halted a lower court’s decision to return the El Salvadoran man back to the United States until the high court could decide on Trump’s request to lift the judge’s return order, The Hill reports. 

Which brings me to this: What does the Trump administration have against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia?

Abrego Garcia is a 29-year-old Salvadoran national who was living in America legally. His wife is a U.S. citizen. He left El Salvador after his family was targeted by a gang. He came to this country looking for a better life. He worked as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license thanks to a permit from the Department of Homeland Security. 

In 2019, an immigration judge stopped the U.S. from deporting Abrego Garica to El Salvador, noting that he had protected status. 

On March 12, federal agents pulled over Abrego Garcia, while his 5-year-old child was in the car and arrested him. They claimed he was a part of MS-13, a notorious gang with ties to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia told officers this wasn’t true and there is nothing linking him to the gang. That didn’t matter as he was taken into custody and later shipped to maximum security CECOT prison in El Salvador. 

The Trump administration would later admit that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported and added that there was nothing they could do to bring him home.

From CNN: 

“Abrego-Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the Title 8 flight to be removed to El Salvador,” Robert Cerna, an acting ICE field office director, said in his declaration, referring to federal immigration law. “Rather, he was an alternate. As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. 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,” the declaration reads.

Can’t stress this part enough: Abrego Garica doesn’t not have ties to MS-13. There are no court records that state this. There is nothing other than the Trump administration claiming his affiliation with the gang. 

And, get this, Erez Reuveni, a Justice Department lawyer, admitted that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported. And what did Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump loyalist, do? She didn’t work to get Abrego Garica back home; she removed Reuveni from the case and placed him on leave. 

The Trump administration has called the deportation and refusal to bring home a man who should’ve never been deported to a maximum security prison an “administrative error.”

On Sunday, District Judge Paula Xinis rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to “pause an order for the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, claiming the removal of the Salvadoran metal worker was ‘wholly lawless,’ and a ‘grievous error,’” CNN reports. 

Xinis ordered the immediate return of Abrego Garcia, and now the Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to block that court order, claiming that the Maryland man is now in another country and they can’t demand his return. 

“The district court’s injunction—which requires Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of a foreign sovereign and return to the United States by midnight on Monday—is patently unlawful,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court papers, CNN reports.

Sauer claimed that the judge’s order was just an attempt to slow President Donald Trump’s agenda.

And in the meantime, while all of this legal stuff is being sorted, an El Salvadoran man who left his country to escape gangs is now in a maximum security prison in El Salvador, when he should’ve never been arrested or deported, and the Trump administration could care less. 

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