The Trump administration is defending the arrest of a migrant who was shipped off to El Salvador’s hell hole mega prison by mistake — alleging that he is an MS-13 gang member with a history of human trafficking.
The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, from El Salvador, has become a rallying cry for critics of Trump’s tough immigration policy.
His lawyers say he’s a Maryland dad, whose wife and young son are both US citizens, and that he was swept up by ICE agents without cause.
A judge granted him protection from deportation in 2019 after he filed a petition for asylum, despite him sneaking into the country illegally in 2011.
The Trump administration argued that regardless of the error, the court does not have jurisdiction to order his return to the US because Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.
On Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security’s spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin hit back at critics who have painted Abrego Garcia as an innocent victim of Trump’s fast-moving deportation raids.
“Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he should be locked up,” McLaughlin said on X.
Abrego Garcia is a “member of the brutal MS-13 gang,” adding that DHS has “intelligence reports that he is involved in human trafficking.”
Immigration agents arrested Abrego Garcia on March 12 as he was driving home from his apprenticeship with a sheet metal worker with his five-year-old son, according to court filings.
During the arrest, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on scene told Abrego Garcia that his “status” in the US “has changed.”
He was then put on a one-way deportation flight to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center as part of President Trump’s use of the 18th century Alien Enemies Act, which allows the feds to remove migrants without a trial.
A story in the Atlantic about his arrest turned national attention to the case.
The story revealed that the Trump administration admitted that Abrego Garcia’s “was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.”
Abrego Garcia was not on the initial list for the deportation flights, but was considered “an alternate” and eventually “moved up the list.”
Now, Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg is asking the Trump administration to return his client to the US, something the feds say they can’t do.
“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told the Atlantic.
“If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”
Sandoval-Moshenberg also denied that Abrego Garcia is tied to the gang.
He was first suspected of gang ties in 2019 when he and three other men were detained at a Home Deport parking lot by cops in Prince George’s County, Maryland, according to court documents.
One of the detained migrants told cops that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang. Abrego Garcia was sent to ICE detention after learning of his alleged role as a top member of the gang.
Abrego Garcia fought his deportation order in court and the judge granted him protection from deportation.
Sandoval-Moshenberg argued that the Trump administration used “extrajudicial means” to deport Abrego Garcia to El Salvador “because they believed that going through the immigration judge process took too long, and they feared that they might not win all of their cases.”
