A federal judge said Friday the government must secure the return of a Prince George’s County, Maryland, man who Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted it deported in error.
More than three weeks after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was detained and flown to a notorious prison in El Salvador, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered that the government return him to the U.S. in about three days, by the end of the day Monday.
“We concede the facts. The plaintiff should not have been removed,” a Justice Department lawyer said Friday afternoon in court in Greenbelt.
Abrego Garcia, 29, was deported because of an “administrative error,” ICE admitted Monday. The Trump administration went on to accuse Abrego Garcia of being in the gang MS-13, which his family denies.
Abrego Garcia’s wife, lawyers and supporters held a rally Friday morning to call for his release. “Bring Kilmar home,” their signs said.
“Kilmar, if you can hear me … I miss you so much … and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children,” his wife, Jennifer, said.
A sudden detention and disappearance
Abrego Garcia had just finished his job as a sheet metal worker and was in the car with his young son when ICE pulled him over and detained him.
He was taken to Baltimore and questioned about his alleged ties to MS-13, his wife said in an affidavit. He was then transferred to Louisiana and La Villa, Texas.
Three days after Abrego Garcia was detained, he was flown to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, ICE confirmed.
His wife spoke to him by phone when he was in the U.S. and tracked his location using ICE’s online detainee locator tool. But when he was flown out of the country, he vanished from the online system and she had no idea where he had been taken.
Finally, she recognized him in a video El Salvador’s president posted to X, showing men in white uniforms being frog-marched and having their heads shaved. In a photo of detainees, she recognized his tattoos.
The government said the order to send Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was an “oversight” and was done “in good faith.”
This week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration’s decision, claimed Abrego Garcia is a gang member and said he will not return to the U.S.
One of his attorneys, Lucia Curiel, said Friday that he was accused of being in MS-13 in 2019 and was cleared. She spoke about the conversation she had with him then.
“I delivered the news to him that the judge had cleared him of the reckless, false gang allegations and granted him witholding of removal. I told him that that meant he could live in the U.S. legally, and that the government was prohibited from deporting him to El Salvador. I had never seen him smile so much. That news that I told him was true then and it is true now,” she said.
“The basis for that allegation in 2019 was a confidential informant, you know, one of these anonymous tips,” attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg previously said. “There was never any concrete evidence produced.”
Abrego Garcia has lived in the U.S. since 2011. He left El Salvador as he fled gang violence, including gang members who threatened to kill him in an attempt to extort his parents, Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
At the rally Friday morning, Abrego Garcia’s wife spoke about how much their three kids miss their dad. She said she found their 10-year-old daughter trying to send him messages on her tablet. The little girl said she wished she could trade places with him.
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