Trump administration concedes Maryland father from El Salvador was mistakenly deported and sent to mega prison

(CNN) — The Trump administration conceded in a court filing Monday that it mistakenly deported a Maryland father to El Salvador “because of an administrative error” and argued it could not return him because he’s now in Salvadoran custody.

The filing stems from a lawsuit over the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who in 2019 was granted protected status by an immigration judge, prohibiting the federal government from sending him to El Salvador.

The filing, first reported by The Atlantic, appears to mark the first time the administration has admitted an error related to its recent deportation flights to El Salvador, which are now at the center of a fraught legal battle.

“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 Trump administration filing states.

Abrego Garcia, who attorneys say fled gang violence in El Salvador more than a decade ago, had been identified by his wife in a photo of detainees entering intake at CECOT, the country’s notorious mega prison.

Prior to his removal, he had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in mid-March “due to his prominent role in MS-13,” according to a court declaration from a senior ICE official. His attorneys say he is not a member of nor has any ties to the MS-13 gang.

“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.

The administration argued that it cannot bring back Abrego Garcia because he’s in Salvadoran custody and knocked down concerns that he’s likely to be tortured or killed at CECOT.

In a new court filing Wednesday, Abrego Garcia’s attorney responded to the error, saying orders by immigration courts are essentially meaningless if the Trump administration’s oversight is not rectified, “because the government can deport whomever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

“Defendants have already washed their hands of Plaintiff, of his U.S.-citizen wife, of his autistic nonverbal five-year-old U.S.-citizen child,” attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said in the filing.

“Defendants’ proposed resolution of this state of affairs, which they caused either intentionally or at best recklessly, is nothing at all. This is an outrageous set of facts,” Sandoval-Moshenberg added.

Abrego Garcia’s legal team is asking for a preliminary injunction that would require the Trump administration to request the government of El Salvador bring him back to the United States, according to court documents. A hearing in the case is scheduled for Friday.

Journey to the United States

Abrego Garcia crossed into the US illegally around 2011. He had a brush with law enforcement in 2019 when he was loitering outside a Maryland Home Depot with a group of men who were approached by local police, according to court documents.

The Prince George’s County Police Department deemed him a gang member because “he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie” and “a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” according to a court document.

Efforts to get more information from police during his 2019 immigration proceedings weren’t fruitful, according to his attorney, who has said in court documents that Abrego Garcia is not a member of nor affiliated with MS-13.

Documents from the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review from 2019 note that Abrego Garcia had been charged with traffic offenses, but that he rebutted the allegation of affiliations with MS-13.

An immigration judge eventually granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal, meaning he could suffer persecution if removed from the US to El Salvador. He was still considered removable; it just couldn’t be to El Salvador.

He was arrested March 12 after completing a shift at a construction site, court documents show.

Abrego Garcia’s wife last spoke to him the morning of the deportation flights, the documents show. He disappeared from the ICE locator system, and she later identified him in photos released by the Salvadoran government.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday acknowledged the administrative error that led to Abrego Garcia’s deportation but added, without providing evidence, that he “was a member of the brutal and vicious MS-13 gang.” She later said he was an MS-13 “leader.”

Pressed to provide evidence for that claim, Leavitt said, “There’s a lot of evidence, and the Department of Homeland Security and ICE have that evidence, and I saw it this morning.”

When CNN followed up with Leavitt after Tuesday’s White House press briefing, she directed questions to the Department of Homeland Security, where a spokesperson also declined to offer any specific evidence of Abrego Garcia’s alleged criminal background.

“The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang — we have intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told CNN. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the US, he should be locked up.”

‘A nightmare for my family,’ wife says

Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, said in an affidavit that his family is devastated by his detention. The couple, who are both 29, share one child together along with two children from Vasquez Sura’s previous relationship. Each child has special needs, said Vasquez Sura, who is a US citizen and was born in Virginia.

The pair married in 2019, while Abrego Garcia was detained but before a judge granted him special status. After Abrego Garcia was granted that status and released with assurances that he would not face deportation proceedings, the family “really believed that the false accusations had been cleared up and that they were behind us,” Vasquez Sura wrote.

On March 12, Abrego Garcia called his wife to tell her he was being pulled over. Their son was in the car with him. Vasquez Sura said she received a call from a Department of Homeland Security official telling her that she need to pick up her son within 10 minutes or Child Protective Services would be called.

Officers told Vasquez Sura after she arrived that her husband’s “‘immigration status had changed’ and (they) were taking him away,” she wrote in the affidavit. She placed her crying child in a car seat and said goodbye to her husband, who was also crying.

Their son, who has autism, “has been very distressed since Kilmar has been gone,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “Although he cannot speak, he shows me how much he missed Kilmar. He has been finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent. He has been crying and acting out more than usual since Kilmar was arrested.”

She said in the document, which was filed March 24, that she hadn’t heard from her husband since March 15. He sounded scared and said he was being deported to CECOT. She later recognized her husband’s features in pictures of CECOT detainees.

“This has been a nightmare for my family,” Vasquez Sura wrote in the affidavit. “My faith in God carries me, but I am exhausted and heartbroken. My children need their father.”

“I need to know when my husband is coming home,” she wrote.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN’s Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.

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