The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.
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In Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “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 government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.
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Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization.
[Garcia's attorney] Sandoval-Moshenberg said that those charges are false, and that the gang label stems from a 2019 incident when Abrego Garcia and three other men were detained in a Home Depot parking lot by a police detective in Prince George’s County, Maryland. During questioning, one of the men told officers that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, but the man offered no proof and police said they didn’t believe him, filings show. Police did not identify him as a gang member.
Ben Shapiro says it's a “bureaucratic screw-up” but not a “human tragedy” that a Maryland father with protected legal status was sent to an El Salvador megaprison
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Citation
From the April 1, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): There was an administrative error here. That is a true thing. So what exactly was the administrative error? According to the filings, on March 12, 2025, ICE Homeland Security investigations arrested Abrego Garcia due to his prominent role in MS-13. Over the next two days, Abrego Garcia was transferred to the staging area for removal flights. The operation that led to Abrego Garcia's removal to El Salvador is designed to include only individuals with no impediments to removal. ICE was aware of a grant withholding of removal at the time of Abrego Garcia's removal from the United States. Reference was made to the status on internal forms. Originally, he was not on the initial manifest of the title eight flight. So what happened is an immigration judge had labeled this guy, years ago, a flight risk and a member of MS-13. And then despite that, there was an order that was a withhold of removal that was put on him because of his credible fear, apparently, that he was going to be harmed by people back in his home country. So that was the screw-up. He was an alternate. He was on the list as an alternate. Like, you can't find the people who are primaries, find the people who are alternate, and then go through the procedure and remove them.
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, according to the filings, Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight. 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.
So, again, this is the part that is the screw-up from The Atlantic. How does the — how exactly is it that The Atlantic fails to mention that an immigration judge literally found that there was credible evidence that he was MS-13, which changes the entire nature of the story. It turns this from a horrifyingly terrible story in which an innocent person with no connections to any form of criminal activity and a five year-old son with disabilities and an American wife is removed for no good reason It's a story where a credibly accused and legally found MS-13 gang member, according to this immigration judge, is removed by accident despite a withholding of removal order. In other words, it's a bureaucratic screw-up, and the guy shouldn't have been removed, but it is not a human tragedy if somebody who is involved in MS-13 ends up being removed from the country. Yeah. It's this sort of desperate hunger for a story to use as a baton against the Trump administration that leads so many members of the news media, the the mainstream legacy media, to play up the headline.