Donald Trump's team has acknowledged that an 'administrative error' saw a Maryland father deported to El Salvador.
The mistake was raised after Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia's wife identified him in a photograph of detainees entering intake at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) - El Salvador's notorious maximum security prison.
The facility was constructed 2022 amid a crackdown on gang violence in the country.
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Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, fled such hostility in his home-country more than a decade ago, moving to the United States.
He has since married an American woman, and is the father to a five-year-old disabled son - who is also a US citizen.
There, he was granted protected status by an immigration judge in 2019, which prohibited the government from sending him back to El Salvador.
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In mid-March, however, the father was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A senior ICE official later claimed in a court declaration that decision to arrest and subsequently deport Abrego Garcia was 'due to his prominent role in MS-13'.
MS-13 - originally known as the Mara Salvatrucha - is an international criminal gang, originally set up in the 80s to protect Salvadoran immigrants from Los Angeles criminal groups.
Abrego Garcia's attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, has insisted that he’s not a member of nor has any ties to the gang in question, and has no criminal record in the US.
In a court ruling filed on Monday (31 March), the Trump administration was forced to hold their hands up to the blunder, which saw him incarcerated at the notoriously dangerous facility.
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"On March 15, 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 Trump administration filing read.
Robert Cerna, an acting ICE field office director, went on to explain: "Abrego-Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the Title 8 flight to be removed to El Salvador. Rather, he was an alternate.
"As others were removed from the flight for various reasons, he moved up the list and was assigned to the flight. The manifest did not indicate that Abrego-Garcia should not be removed."
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Cerna added: "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."
It is understood that Trump's team are now at the centre of a high-stakes legal battle, as per The Atlantic.
The administration claimed that Abrego Garcia - who works full time as a union sheetmetal apprentice - couldn't return to the States, being that he's now being held in Salvadoran custody.
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Representatives also advised the court to dismiss the return request on multiple grounds, alleging the president's 'primacy in foreign affairs' outweighs the father's case.
Responding to this, Sandoval-Moshenberg told the publication: "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."
Prior to his January inauguration, Trump announced plans to embark on the 'largest deportation programme in history', vowing to deport 'maybe as many as 20 million' people.
"We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came," he added.
Trump also elaborated by revealing that migrants accused of crimes would be the first targets of the policy.
Topics: Donald Trump, US News, Politics, World News, Crime
Rhianna Benson