Lawyers for a Maryland man who was inadvertently deported last month to a notorious Salvadoran prison despite an order that he could remain in the United States angrily urged the judge overseeing his case on Wednesday to force the Trump administration to bring him back as soon as possible.
In a court filing, the lawyers for the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, furiously took issue with almost every aspect of the case. To start, they said, Trump officials had acknowledged on Monday night that they had made an “administrative error” by flying Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador on March 15 even though a U.S. immigration judge had already determined that he might face torture there.
The lawyers also expressed shock that the administration was maintaining that it had little power to get Mr. Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national whose wife and child are both American citizens, out of custody. The prison where he is being held, known as CECOT, has long had a reputation of having brutal conditions.
“Defendants have already washed their hands of plaintiff, of his U.S.-citizen wife, of his autistic nonverbal five-year-old U.S.-citizen child,” the lawyers wrote. “Defendants’ proposed resolution of this state of affairs, which they caused either intentionally or at best recklessly, is nothing at all. This is an outrageous set of facts.”
The case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is the latest flashpoint in a multifront and increasingly bitter battle between immigration lawyers and the White House, which in recent weeks has been escalating its efforts to deport hundreds of migrants using both traditional and highly unorthodox methods.
The case has raised questions not only about how a man whom a judge had granted permission to remain in the United States could have ended up on a plane to El Salvador, but also about why the Trump administration has apparently done nothing to correct its mistake.