Outrage grows over US dad’s deportation to El Salvador
In the 22 days since Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador, his young son has sought comfort in the scent of his missing father’s clothes.
“He shows me how much he missed Kilmar,” Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said in court documents. “He has been finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent.”
Abrego Garcia, 29, who worked as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license, was pulled over in an Ikea parking lot and arrested on March 12, with his 5-year-old son in the car.
An immigration judge in 2019 had granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador, where Abrego Garcia was likely to face persecution by local gangs. He had a legal work permit issued by the Department of Homeland Security, his lawyer said.
‘Administrative error’
Yet he was sent back to his native El Salvador, which President Donald Trump ’s administration acknowledged on Monday was an “administrative error.”
Despite this, White House officials have argued against bringing him back, alleging without showing proof that he has ties to the MS-13 gang.
The administration further says it lacks the power to seek his return from El Salvador’s government, noting that a US court could at best order the White House to “entreat—or even cajole—a close ally.”
Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation has outraged many while raising concerns about the expulsion of noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the United States.
Abrego Garcia’s family and lawyers have denied any gang ties and argue that the United States has little evidence to support its claim. In court documents filed Wednesday, his lawyers argued that the US government’s mistake must be corrected and that he be returned.
Otherwise, immigration court orders are “meaningless, because the government can deport whomever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want,” lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg wrote.
‘Just ask them nicely’
Sandoval-Moshenberg noted the United States has been paying El Salvador’s government to incarcerate Abrego Garcia and other deportees.
He argued that efforts to return him would likely be successful: “First, just ask them nicely to please give him back to us.”
“Their argument that there’s nothing they could possibly do to get this guy back is significantly weakened by the fact that, on Wednesday of last week, they put Kristi Noem inside that prison,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Associated Press in an interview, referring to the DHS secretary.
“They didn’t so much as ask and say, ‘By the way, you got this one guy. We messed up. Can we have him back, please?’’’ he said, adding that the United States previously “moved mountains” to return people mistakenly deported.
Not US citizen
Ohio State law professor César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández said it’s “reasonable” to ask the Trump administration to return Abrego Garcia, but the courts have little recourse if the White House refuses.
That’s because Abrego Garcia is not a US citizen and is outside the country, the professor said. The Supreme Court has long held that Congress, working with the executive branch, gets to decide who’s allowed to enter and under what terms.
Abrego Garcia said he fled El Salvador because a gang, Barrio 18, routinely extorted his parents’ business for “rent” money and threatened to kill him and his brother if the family didn’t comply.
