The Trump administration grew even more defiant in its dealings with a federal judge Monday evening, pointing to a White House meeting between Donald Trump and the president of El Salvador earlier in the day to essentially say the administration would not seek to return a Maryland man who was incorrectly deported.
The Department of Justice blew its 5 p.m. deadline to update U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on its efforts to bring back Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the maximum security “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador.
When the DOJ did file nearly an hour late, lawyers provided only a brief statement from a Department of Homeland Security attorney showing how the administration is washing its hands of any responsibility for the improper deportation and leaving the matter solely up to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
“DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation,” wrote Joseph N. Mazzara, DHS’s acting general counsel.
While Abrego Garcia originally came to the United States illegally in 2011, he has been in the country with a kind of legal gray status since 2019, when he was granted “withholding of removal” over the threat of gang violence in his native El Salvador. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Abrego Garcia in Baltimore on March 12 and deported him to El Salvador three days later without a trial.
Although the Trump administration previously admitted Abrego Garcia was improperly deported, with the court filing on Monday, the administration is taking a new oppositional stance to the Supreme Court’s order that the White House should “facilitate” the Maryland father’s release from custody and return to the United States.
Judge Xinis now has to determine how to view this latest court filing ahead of a hearing on Tuesday, when the legal fight could quickly start heading back to the Supreme Court.
This latest turn follows the way Trump and Bukele joined forces at the White House on Monday, mocking journalists and making clear that they would jointly defy a Supreme Court order that instructed the federal government to take steps to return the Maryland father of a special needs child.
The high court last week made clear that the federal government should make up for its own admitted “administrative error” in deporting Abrego Garcia, despite his protected migrant status. However, the leaders of both nations put on a display of defiance during a bilateral summit in the Oval Office when asked about the matter.
Bukele followed up with an argument that he couldn’t possibly release a “terrorist” and sneak him back to the United States. (In reality, Abrego Garcia has not been charged with any crime, and he was not put on trial before being whisked off to El Salvador’s maximum security prison known as CECOT.)
“How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States? What do I do with him? Of course I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said.
“The question is preposterous,” he added. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
What started as a botched law enforcement operation — and has quickly become a civil rights flash point — has now morphed into a political football, with both presidents testing the ability of U.S. courts to rein in an executive branch that has improperly sent someone to a foreign prison widely accused of torturing inmates.
When asked about the matter, Trump deferred to Attorney General Pam Bondi. (Bondi delivered an alternative interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision, taking no responsibility for the U.S. to take action.)
“That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him,” Bondi said, while sitting on an office couch. “That’s not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled ... if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it — meaning, provide a plane.”
At Trump’s behest, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller continued recasting the Supreme Court’s ruling while standing over Bondi’s shoulder, claiming that any action now is “at El Salvador’s sole discretion.”
Bukele quickly posted about his White House visit, with an ominous exchange captured on tape about seven minutes into the hour-long video. In the video, Trump is heard telling Bukele that “homegrown criminals are next.”
“You gotta build about five more places,” Trump said.
“Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele responded, followed by a round of laughter from nearby officials.
“It’s not big enough!” Trump shot back.
The legal filing comes just days after Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned — in a separate case — about the extreme danger of allowing the Trump administration’s latest operations against undocumented migrants and its post hoc legal justifications when challenged.
“The government’s argument … implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene,” she wrote.
At this point, the Trump administration is openly defying federal judges in its mission to broaden its attacks on both documented and undocumented migrants — and lying about provable facts listed in court records.
Although Bondi and Miller both alleged that immigration judges had somehow determined that Abrego Garcia was a member of the notorious MS-13 gang, in reality a single allegation was made by a disgraced local cop who claimed, without evidence, that the Maryland father was part of a Long Island clique — even though Abrego Garcia maintained he’d never traveled to New York.
Earlier on Monday, Miller took to Fox News to claim Abrego Garcia was not even improperly deported, and tried to fabricate a political conspiracy out of it.
“A DOJ lawyer, who has since been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat put into a filing, incorrectly, that this was a mistaken removal. It was not. This was the right person sent to the right place,” Miller falsely claimed on Fox News.
In reality, the disclosure that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported was made by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official: Robert L. Cerna, the acting field office director of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations at the Harlingen, Texas, field office.
“This removal was an error,” Cerna wrote in a signed declaration on March 31. “Through administrative error, Abrego-Garcia was removed from the United States to El Salvador. This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.