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Topics: Donald Trump, News, Politics, US News, World News
Rhianna Benson
Topics: Donald Trump, News, Politics, US News, World News
The United States Supreme Court has provided an shocking update on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The father-of-one was wrongly deported to South America following an 'oversight' by the Trump administration on 15 March, and has since been detained at El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the country's notorious maximum security prison.
The mistake was raised by his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, after Abrego Garcia - a union sheetmetal apprentice - was suddenly arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), who accused him of having a 'prominent role in MS-13'.
The group refers to an international criminal gang that was originally set up in the 80s in a bid to protect Salvadoran immigrants from fellow Los Angeles criminal gangs.
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Abrego Garcia was born in El Salvador before fleeing hostility in his home country over a decade ago. After moving to the States, he met and married his wife, who is a US citizen, with the pair going on to welcome a son, now five.
In 2019, he was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, which prohibited the American government from sending him back.
Appealing his case, Abrego Garcia's attorney previously insisted that he has no affiliation to the criminal gang in question, prompting the Trump administration to last week admit that his deportation was an 'administrative error'.
A return request was later put into place by a lower court judge, giving Trump's team a 'deadline' to have Abrego Garcia reunited with his family.
Now, in a shocking new update, a Supreme Court official has now blocked the lower court's deadline order, meaning the Trump administration are no longer compelled to have Abrego Garcia returned to the States by midnight on Monday (as per the BBC).
The move came after an emergency appeal by Trump's team, which itself was made on the grounds that courts should not be asked to intervene on broader legal claims - such as Abrego Garcia's.
The Justice Department previously admitted that they couldn't help in bringing him back to the States, with attorneys advising the court to dismiss the return request on multiple grounds.
The Department insisted that Trump's 'primacy in foreign affairs' outweighs the case in question, adding that - on another note - US officials cannot compel El Salvador to return Abrego Garcia.
More recently, they alleged retrieving him is no longer a feasible option, claiming that the deadline set by a lower court Maryland judge 'sets the United States up for failure'.
The Department also claimed the judge in question lacked the authority to set the order in the first place, prompting the Supreme Court to block it entirely in a new shock twist.
"The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador, nor can it compel El Salvador to follow a federal judge's bidding," US Solicitor General D John Sauer wrote in the Trump administration's emergency court filing.
"The Constitution charges the president, not federal district courts, with the conduct of foreign diplomacy and protecting the nation against foreign terrorists, including by effectuating their removal."
Sandoval-Moshenberg previously told of the administration's controversial appeal: "They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief.
"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."
Abrego Garcia's wife Sura previously spoke out on her husband's case, confessing that she and her son are 'very scared' about his safety at the infamously dangerous criminal facility.
"I've seen news of that prison, and I know they take criminals there," she told CBS News last week. "And my husband’s not a criminal."
Sura added: "My husband is an amazing person. An amazing father."