Feds Won’t Correct Error That Jailed Dad

Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, is married to a U.S. citizen, and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen. So why is he sitting in a prison in El Salvador? In a court filing on Monday, 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. DOJ lawyers said the court could not bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.

Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg is Garcia’s attorney, and he’s somewhere between furious and flummoxed by this turn in his client’s case. “They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Atlantic. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”

Garcia was not charged with a crime, but he was handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after being arrested to face deportation. In those proceedings, the government claimed that a reliable informant had identified him as a ranking member of MS-13. Abrego Garcia and his family hired an attorney and fought the government’s attempt to deport him. He received “withholding of removal” six months later, a protected status.

His is not a path to permanent U.S. residency, but it means the government won’t deport him back to his home country because he’s more likely than not to face harm there.

Garcia has had no contact with any law-enforcement agency since his release, according to his attorney. He works full time as a union sheet-metal apprentice, has complied with requirements to check in annually with ICE, and cares for his 5-year-old son, who has autism and a hearing defect and is unable to communicate verbally.

So, how did his family and attorney find out that he was in prison? His wife recognized him on television! Garcia’s wife recognized her husband’s decorative arm tattoo and scars, according to the court filing. The image showed Salvadoran guards in black ski masks frog-marching him into the prison, with his head shoved down toward the floor. Try to imagine how that must have felt!

And before you ask, yes, this is exactly the same prison where Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem callously staged a photo op last week. Could she not have brought Garcia back with her while she was there? I’m sure she would claim that she didn’t know about him, but news that there are dozens of men wrongfully sent to that prison makes it unlikely that she didn’t know about the situation in general and did nothing to change their status while she was there.

Sandoval-Moshenberg told the court that he believes Trump officials deported his client “through extrajudicial means because they believed that going through the immigration judge process took too long, and they feared that they might not win all of their cases.’’

In Monday’s filing, ICE admitted that they knew at the time that they were making a mistake. “ICE was aware of this grant of withholding of removal at the time [of] Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States. Reference was made to this status on internal forms,” the filing says.

Yet, they chose to go ahead and jail an innocent man, a father who is very much needed at home, and send him to El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the deportation flight but was listed “as an alternate,” the government attorneys explained. As other detainees were removed from the flight for various reasons, Abrego Garcia “moved up the list.’’

The filing states, “Through administrative error, Abrego Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight.” But despite this, government attorneys told the court that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was carried out ‘’in good faith.’’

Attorneys not directly attached to this case have said that the situation is highly unusual and that Garcia should not, under any circumstances, have been on that flight. Moreover, Noem should have made an effort to bring back all of those who were taken under unlawful circumstances.

There is little doubt that this is an egregious act, and no one believes for a minute that the government is helpless to do anything. The US sent them down there, the US can damn well fly them back. First Class.

Is this a bad case of racial profiling? Yes. Is this a bad case of ICE having too much power? Yes. What are the chances they’ll bring Garcia back on their own? None.

In instances like this, one might that that public demand would cause the government to be embarrassed by its mistake and bring Garcia back. With this administration, however, nothing seems to embarrass them, and no one seems to have a conscience. So, feel free to share this story all over social media so that it hits all the news outlets and becomes an issue that the White House has to deal with.