By Steve Neavling
The U.S. government mistakenly deported a Maryland man to El Salvador despite a court order protecting him from removal, landing him in a notorious prison where he remains in legal limbo.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident since 2011, was deported on March 15 in what federal officials now admit was an “administrative error,” according to court filings Monday, NBC News reports.
“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 acknowledged in the filing.
Garcia, who lives with his wife and 5-year-old son with autism, was detained by Homeland Security agents in Maryland after work on March 12. According to a lawsuit filed last week, he was not given an explanation for his arrest and was later deported without a hearing, in violation of a 2019 court order barring his removal.
Garcia is now being held in CECOT, a massive Salvadoran prison where human rights groups have documented extreme overcrowding, torture, and hundreds of deaths. A DHS spokesperson on Tuesday claimed Garcia is a member of MS-13 and accused media outlets of “doing the bidding of these vicious gangs,” but the government has not provided any evidence beyond a confidential informant’s allegation from a 2019 bond hearing.
“There was never any hard and fast proof,” said Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg. “They could have gone back to the judge who, in 2019, gave him an order of protection and could have asked that judge to lift that order. They didn’t do that, they just put him on an airplane.”
Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, discovered he had been sent to CECOT after recognizing his tattoos and scars in a news image of detainees kneeling with shaved heads and obscured faces.
“She was shocked,” the filing says.
Sen. JD Vance falsely claimed Tuesday that Garcia was a “convicted MS-13 gang member” and later called him “an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country.” Garcia has no criminal convictions in the U.S. or El Salvador, according to his legal team.
The lawsuit accuses Homeland Security and ICE of knowingly sending Garcia to a country where he faces torture. Government lawyers argue U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return and say his legal team has not shown he faces likely harm.
A federal judge in Maryland is expected to hear the case Friday.
