A federal judge has called the arrest and subsequent deportation of a Maryland father to a mega-prison in El Salvador “wholly lawless”.
In a legal opinion explaining why she is demanding that the Trump administration return 29-year-old Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the US, the District Judge Paula Xinis said there was not sufficient evidence to support the “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that he was once in the MS-13 gang.
US officials “had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western hemisphere”, Xinis wrote.
Like hundreds of other US deportees, Abrego Garcia, who has never been charged with a crime, is currently being held in El Salvador’s notorious Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT).
Attorneys for the US government last week admitted that Abrego Garcia’s deportation had happened because of an “administrative error”, conceding that a court order was in place barring him from being sent to El Salvador.
However, the government has subsequently argued that it cannot return Abrego Garcia to the US, where he has lived since 2011 and where he has a family, because it lacks the jurisdiction.
Salvadoran gangs ‘threatening him with death’
Xinis poured scorn on the Trump administration’s argument that it is now unable to secure Abrego Garcia’s return to the US.
“They do indeed cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person – migrant and US citizen alike – to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the court thus lacks jurisdiction,” she wrote.
The judge added that “the facts say otherwise” and that the government had “produced no evidence to suggest they cannot secure” the detainee.
Xinis stressed that an immigration order from 2019 should have prevented Abrego Garcia from being deported to El Salvador.
“Such protection bars the United States from sending a non [US] citizen to a country where, more likely than not, he would face persecution that risks his ‘life or freedom’,” she said.
An immigration judge granted Abrego Garcia a ‘withholding of removal’ order in 2019 after concluding that he faced death threats from a gang in El Salvador.
Xinis also underlined the paucity of evidence presented by the government against Abrego Garcia.
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York – a place he has never lived,” a footnote to her opinion reads.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) previously told Euronews that it possessed “intelligence reports” that Abrego Garcia was a gang member.
ADVERTISEMENT“Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the US, he should be locked up,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told Euronews.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer denied that their client was ever part of a gang.
The Salvadoran national had a DHS permit to legally work in the US and was employed as a sheet metal apprentice, the lawyer added.
Xinis issued the legal opinion not long after questioning Justice Department Attorney Erez Reuveni about the Salvadoran national’s deportation.
ADVERTISEMENTReuveni, who admitted that Abrego Garcia “should not have been removed to El Salvador”, was subsequently suspended from his position.
Additional sources • AP
