Washington (AP) – The Supreme Court said Thursday that the Trump administration was to facilitate the return of a Maryland man who had wrongly expelled the Salvador, rejecting the administration’s emergency call.
The court acted in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoral citizen who had an order of the immigration court preventing his expulsion to his native country to fear that he could face the persecution of local gangs.
US District Judge Paula Xinis had ordered that Garcia, now detained in a notorious Salvadoran prison, returned to the United States at midnight on Monday.
“The ordinance correctly obliges the government to” facilitate “the release of Abrego Garcia de la Garde in Salvador and to ensure that his case is treated as it was would not have been sent wrongly to El Salvador,” the court said in an unsigned order without dissenting.
Head judge John Roberts had already rejected Xinis’s deadline, and the judges said that his order should now be clarified to ensure that she did not introduce herself into the power of the branches of executives on foreign affairs, because Abrego Garcia is held abroad. The court said that the Trump administration should also be ready to share the necessary measures to try to recover it – and what it could do.
The administration says that Greo Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang, although he has never been charged or found guilty of a crime. His lawyers said there was no evidence that he was in MS-13.
The administration conceded that it had made a mistake by sending it to Salvador, but argued that he could not do anything about it.
Liberal judges of the Court said that the administration should have hurried to correct “its glaring error” and was “clearly wrong” to suggest that it could not bring it home.
“The government’s argument also implies that he could expel and incarcerate any person, including American citizens, without legal consequences, as long as he does before a court can intervene,” wrote Sonia Sotomayor, joined by his two colleagues.
In the district court, Xinis wrote that the decision to arrest Abrego Garcia and send it to Salvador seems to be “entirely without law”. There is little or no evidence in support of a “vague and non-corroborated” allegation according to which Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once in the gang of rue MS-13, Xinis wrote.
Abrego Garcia, 29, was owned by immigration agents and deported last month.
He had a license from the Department of Homeland Security to work legally in the United States and was an apprentice in a sheet pursuing a companion license, said his lawyer. His wife is an American citizen.
In 2019, an immigration judge prevented the United States from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, noting that he was facing a probable persecution by local gangs.
A lawyer for the Ministry of Justice conceded during a court hearing that Garcia Garcia should not have been expelled. The Attorney General Pam Bondi then withdrew the lawyer, Erez Rebeni, from the case and placed it on leave.
The writer Associated Press, Lindsay Whitehurst, contributed to this report.
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
