Trump administration admits Maryland man sent to El Salvador prison by mistake

The Trump administration is getting blowback for confirmed and potential errors in its rush to deport hundreds of men to El Salvador last month.

On Monday night, immigration officials admitted to deporting a Maryland man to El Salvador due to an “administrative error.”

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who lived with his U.S. citizen wife and child, was identified as being on one of the three deportation flights to El Salvador last month that are the subject of several lawsuits. Immigration advocates claim those flown to El Salvador did not receive due process.

The administration used the three flights to quickly deport over three hundred men it accused of being members of MS-13, a gang with connections to El Salvador that originated in Los Angeles, and Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. They were later moved to CECOT, a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.

One of them was Abrego Garcia, who his wife identified through photos released by the El Salvadoran government.

“The government’s filing was pretty shocking because they admitted everything that we alleged,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, the lawyer representing Abrego Garcia and his family, told NPR.

Although Justice Department lawyers acknowledge the mistake in Abrego Garcia’s case, they say there is nothing federal officials can do because he is now in custody of another country.

And White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday doubled down on his deportation, pointing to his links to MS-13 — which Abrego Garcia’s lawyers dispute.

This latest case adds to the growing judicial scrutiny about the deportations, and has even prompted some consternation from one of Trump’s allies. Joe Rogan, the popular host of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast who endorsed Trump last year, this week raised concerns with potential errors in the El Salvador deporations.

“It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not real, but if it is real this is f****** horrible,” Rogan said in his latest episode, when discussing the case of Venezuelan makeup artist Andry. Andry’s lawyer argues he was a legal asylum seeker who was deported.

His lawyers want him brought back

Abrego Garcia first fought accusations that he was a member of MS-13 under the first Trump administration.

According to court documents, Abrego Garcia in 2019 he was served a notice to appear in immigration court. An immigration judge did find him to be removable from the U.S. — but granted him a withholding of removal, which barred the U.S. government from deporting him to El Salvador specifically.

The Board of Immigration Appeals, which handles appeals from both immigrants and the U.S. government, later upheld Abrego Garcia’s block on being deported to El Salvador.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers and Robert Cerna, acting field office director for Enforcement Removal Operations, both agree that these prior court decisions mean that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported to El Salvador last month.

Court documents detail that when Abrego Garcia was detained last month, he was questioned once more about any gang affiliations and told that he would be brought before a judge.

Sandoval-Moshenberg said he has previously dealt with wrongful deportation cases, during which the U.S. does try to bring people back. He filed a petition to have Abrego Garcia released from CECOT and returned to the United States.

“In this case, they don’t claim that they’re taking any steps whatsoever to rectify the mistake that they made,” he said.

He said they filed the case last week, days before Secretary of Homeland Security Krisi Noem visited the El Salvador prison. “They knew about this case. They put Kristi Noem inside the secret jail. And now they’re saying that we can’t do anything about it. I’m not willing to accept that,” he said.

A response from the Justice Department argues that although officials mistakenly deported Abrego Garcia, there is nothing they can do now.

“The heavy interest in the President’s primacy in foreign affairs outweigh the interests on the Plaintiffs’ side of the scale. Although the Defendants recognize the financial and emotional hardships to Abrego Garcia’s family, the public interest in not returning a member of a violent criminal gang to the United States outweighs those individual interests.” Tthe Justice Department wrote in its filing on Monday.

“They have made no showing that the removal of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was something other than an administrative error.”

Vice President JD Vance also posted on the social media platform X about the case, accusing Abrego Garcia of being a “convicted member of MS-13.”

“My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize,” Vance said in the post.

Government says it’s doing due diligence

During a Monday interview on Fox News’ Special Report, Noem said that she trusts the government’s intelligence agencies and personnel to target members of the gangs.

“We are doing due diligence to make sure that we’re going after these criminals [who] have perpetrated violence on American citizens, and we’re removing them from our country,” Noem said.

And Leavitt, the White House press secretary, spoke specifically about Abrego Garcia’s case on Tuesday, saying “The administration maintains the position that this individual, who was deported to El Salvador and will not be returning to our country, was a member of the brutal, vicious MS-13 gang.” She also accused Abrego Garcia of being involved in human trafficking and that he was a gang leader.

In the filing, Abrego Garcia’s attorney pushes back on claims of a criminal history, noting that he has never been convicted of a crime in the U.S. or any other country.

“Although he has been accused of general ‘gang affiliation,’ the U.S. government has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation,” the suit said.

His lawyers say law enforcement in Prince George’s County in Maryland where he lived never again questioned him regarding MS-13 or accused him of membership in MS-13 after his initial arrest in 2019.

“Should Defendants wish to remove Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to any other country, they would have no legal impediment in doing so,” lawyers said in filings. “But Defendants found those legal procedures bothersome, so they merely ignored them and deported Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to El Salvador anyway, ripping him away from his U.S.-citizen wife, Plaintiff Vasquez Sura, and his disabled U.S.-citizen child.”

Sandoval-Moshenberg and DOJ attorneys will appear at the federal district court in Maryland on April 4 for a hearing over the case. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers plan to use that as another opportunity to request that the administration ask the El Salvadoran government to return him to U.S. custody.

“If they’re allowed to get away with this, then it means that the immigration laws are meaningless, all of them,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “It means that immigration courts and their orders are meaningless because the government can just violate those orders by means of force or simply putting someone on a plane. That can’t be the case.”