The Trump administration told a court on Monday it does not have the ability to retrieve a man it mistakenly deported to a Salvadoran prison, capping off a three-day string of defiant court filings in an intensifying case about Kilmar Abrego Gacia’s removal.
The administration’s submission to the court came in response to an order from Judge Paula Xinis, who demanded on Friday that the Department of Justice provide daily updates about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts and what authorities were doing to “facilitate” his return. She plans to reconvene with the government on Tuesday for a hearing to go over the status of the case.
The DOJ’s updates have been sparse and tight-lipped as the administration projects both inside and outside of the courtroom that it construed a Supreme Court order last week to mean it did not have to make any effort to bring Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, back to the United States.
DOJ attorneys wrote in a separate court filing on Sunday that they interpreted the order from the high court to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to mean that the U.S. government will accept Abrego Garcia if and only if El Salvador chooses to return him.
“The return of Abrego Garcia is thus best read as taking all available steps to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede the alien’s ability to return here. Indeed, no other reading of ‘facilitate’ is tenable—or constitutional—here,” the DOJ attorneys wrote.
Xinis wanted the regular updates from the DOJ after she said Friday that the government “failed to comply” with her initial order to address Abrego Garcia’s imprisonment. The DOJ has conceded several times that his deportation to the prison in El Salvador was an “administrative error.”
The DOJ’s court submission on Monday came more than an hour past the 5 p.m. deadline and after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele visited Washington and met with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office. Bukele and administration officials faced questions from the press about Abrego Garcia’s case, leading top Trump officials to emphasize that the Department of Homeland Security believed he was a member of the MS-13 gang based off information the DHS received from an informant years ago.
Bukele, for his part, said the question of whether he would release Abrego Garcia and send him back to the United States was “preposterous.”
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said.
In Monday’s response to the court, the government did not provide any new information except for alerting the court to Bukele’s visit and providing a YouTube link to his remarks.
Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said in a Fox News interview Monday morning that because the government classified MS-13 as a terrorist organization in February, Abrego Garcia could, in fact, be deported to El Salvador even after an immigration court in 2019 barred the government from deporting him to that country because of worries that he would face persecution by gangs there. Miller also emphasized this point from the Oval Office.
“If he was your neighbor, you would move right away,” deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told a reporter.
Abrego Garcia entered the country illegally around 2012 and has been living in Maryland with his now-wife, who is a U.S. citizen, and his three children. He has no criminal charges or convictions in any country and is not a member of the gang, his lawyer has told the court.
Prior to Monday, the DOJ provided two daily updates. The first one came Saturday in the form of a declaration from a State Department official, who said that it was his “understanding” that Abrego Garcia was “alive and secure” in the prison in El Salvador.
SALVADORAN PRESIDENT NAYIB BUKELE DECLINES TO RETURN MISTAKENLY DEPORTED MARYLAND MAN
The following day, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said in a declaration that he had “no updates.” The official also said that since the government accused Abrego Garcia of being a member of MS-13, he was “no longer” eligible for protective status that blocked the government from sending him to El Salvador.
