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The US Supreme Court has directed the Trump administration to return a man it erroneously deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, the latest legal blow to the government’s efforts to turbocharge mass deportations.
The top court on Thursday upheld a lower court decision that had ordered the government to “facilitate and effectuate the return of” Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the US, after the Trump administration said his deportation to an El Salvador prison last month was a result of an “administrative error”.
The American government has alleged that Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen, is a member of the MS-13 gang, which US President Donald Trump has designated a foreign terrorist organisation. Abrego Garcia has rejected this claim, and a US immigration judge in 2019 withheld his removal to El Salvador due to “a clear probability of future persecution”.
“The rule of law won today,” said Andrew Rossman, a lawyer representing Abrego Garcia. “Time to bring him home”.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The ruling is the latest setback in the government’s plans to accelerate mass deportations, a main focus for Trump in his second presidency.
The president last month invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a statute last used in the second world war to intern non-US citizens of Italian, German and Japanese descent — to deport hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. Federal judges have issued temporary restraining orders halting removals under the controversial wartime law.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, led by Sonia Sotomayor, on Thursday wrote that the government’s argument that US courts cannot grant relief once a deportee crosses the country’s borders “is plainly wrong”. They added that the administration had “cited no basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison”.
“Abrego Garcia has never been charged with a crime, in any country,” his lawyers have said in legal filings.
“He is not wanted by the government of El Salvador. He sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake”.
No justices opposed the decision.
Government lawyers on Monday asked the Supreme Court to lift the lower court’s injunction, shortly before an appellate court refused to block the order.
They have said “the Constitution charges the President, not federal district courts, with the conduct of foreign diplomacy and protecting the Nation against foreign terrorists, including by effectuating their removal”, according to court documents.
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