President Donald Trump’s public meeting with El Salvador President Naive Buquere on April 14 focused on the false deportation of Kilmer Armando Abrego Garcia.
Trump administration officials and Buquere said Abrego Garcia would not be returned to the United States four days after the US Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration must promote Abrego Garcia’s return.
On March 15, the US government expelled Abrego Garcia to Secott. Secott sent hundreds of Salvadoran and Venezuelan men Trump had previously in the United States. However, Abrego Garcia had the protection that was supposed to prevent him from being deported to El Salvador. The Justice Department called Abrego Garcia’s deportation as “surveillance” and “administrative errors” in court filings.
During the Oval Office Meeting, Buquere and several Trump administration officials issued misleading statements about the Abrego Garcia incident and the role the US and El Salvador governments play in his potential return.
This is the truth.
Did the court control Abrego Garcia with MS-13 members?
That’s what Attorney General Pam Bondy argued. “In 2019, two courts, the Immigration Court and the Appeal Court, ruled that (Abrego Garcia) is a member of MS-13,” she said at the White House.
This requires context. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Abrego Garcia in 2019 after he was searching for Day’s labor outside the Maryland Home Depostore. Police informants told police that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member. The immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia Bond both initially and on appeal, citing the informant’s charges.
In the initial denial, the judge said Abrego Garcia’s gang membership decision “seems to be trustworthy,” and that evidence from the gang field interview sheets in part referred to informants. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have repeatedly told court that the informant’s charges were manufactured.
The immigration judge’s decision to deny bonds is not equivalent to determining Abrego Garcia is a gang member, said David Beer, associate director of immigration studies at the Libertarian Cato Institute.
During immigration bond hearings, detainees are responsible for evidence that they are neither flight risk nor risk to the community. Abrego Garcia “didn’t meet his burden to show that he was not dangerous,” Via said. That’s not the same as the government is positively proof that he is an MS-13 member.
“The immigration judges take only the evidence provided by the government at face value,” Bea said. “We haven’t evaluated the fundamental validity at that stage.”
Abrego Garcia later received immigrant protections, known as withholding for removal. The protections include the Department of Homeland Security accepting that it is not a “hazard to US security” in order to decide on Abrego Garcia, citing the US immigration law.
“The Trump administration did not appeal the grant of withholding these decisions or removals,” Bea said. “So at the time, it didn’t consider him a threat, and no new evidence has been presented since.”
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney for Abrego Garcia, said his client was “never been convicted of gang-related or other crimes.” Neither immigration court cases constitute a conviction, as they were not in trial.
Did the MS-13 “terrorist” label justify the expulsion of Abrego Garcia?
“When President Trump declares MS-13 a foreign terrorist organization, that means (Abrego Garcia) is no longer eligible under federal law… for all forms of immigration relief in the United States.”
The US government’s designation of MS-13 as a foreign terrorist organization in February is inaccurate that it automatically revoked protections from the removal of Abrego Garcia, said Aaron Reichlin Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Council for Immigration.
People who are proven members of terrorist organizations are not eligible for protection from removal. However, in Abrego Garcia’s case, in order to revoke his protection, the US government would have “resumed immigration court cases and be required under the law to prove to the judge that he is a member of MS-13 and therefore not entitled to withholding.”
“The government may certainly have tried to prove that (Abrego Garcia) is not eligible for immigrant relief, but they did not,” Bea said.
Is Abrego Garcia a “terrorist”?
When asked by journalists whether El Salvador would return Abrego Garcia to the United States, President Naive Buquere said doing so was like “smuggling terrorists into the United States.”
There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist. It has not been proven that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 and therefore a terrorist after the designation of foreign terrorists of the gang.
Reichlin Melnick said Abrego Garcia is being held in a Salvador prison at the request of the US government, not because he committed a crime in El Salvador. So Buquel is able to release Abrego Garcia and the US government can grant him humanitarian parole “as part of a court order requiring them to promote his return,” Reichlin Melnick added.
Has the Trump administration won the Supreme Court case over Abrego Garcia?
Yes, according to Miller. “We’ve won (Supreme Court) cases 9-0, and people like CNN portray it as a loss,” he said.
But that is misleading. On April 10, the Supreme Court held that an unsigned order had to “promote” the release of Abrego Garcia from custody in El Salvador and ensure that his case was processed if he had not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
The Supreme Court also urged the lower courts to “prove respect for the administrative department in its conduct and to clarify its orders.” A lower court ordered the United States to “promote and influence” the release of Abrego Garcia.
On April 11, a federal judge said the US government “didn’t comply” with the court’s orders and ordered the government to provide daily updates on Abrego Garcia’s location and the measures it took to promote his return. になったんです。 English: The first thing you can do is to find the best one to do.
Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.