April 1 (UPI) — A Maryland man remains locked away in a foreign prison for terrorists despite a sworn declaration from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official that the deportation was made by mistake.
“This removal was an error,” said acting ICE field office director Robert Cerna in a statement Monday. “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.”
The sworn testimony is part of a new lawsuit filed by Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys Monday who have asked that the government of El Salvador return him to the U.S. However, although the government administration has acknowledged the error, the courts don’t have the jurisdiction to either order him returned from El Salvador or to order the Salvadorian government to release and return him.
Kilmer Abrego-Garcia, who has protected legal status and a U.S. citizen wife, is currently being held at the Terrorism Confinement Center prison, or CECOT, in El Salvador.
His attorneys said Abrego-Garcia “is not a member of or has no affiliation with Tren de Aragua, MS-13, or any other criminal street gang” adding that the government “has never produced an iota of evidence to support this unfounded accusation.”
They said that instead, a confidential informant had reported in 2019 that Abrego-Garcia, a native and citizen of El Salvador, “was an active member” of the gang MS-13, but he then filed an application for asylum and was granted “withholding of removal to El Salvador.”
However, he was arrested earlier this month by ICE officers who “informed him that his immigration status had changed,” according to his legal team.
He was then transferred to a detention center in Texas, before being sent to CECOT on March 15.
His lawyers filed for a temporary restraining order Monday that requests the U.S. government “immediately stop paying compensation to the government of El Salvador for the detention of plaintiff Abrego-Garcia,” and for “an order that the federal government request that the government of El Salvador return plaintiff Abrego-Garcia.”
The government has since purported that Abrego-Garcia had an opportunity to prove he wasn’t a member of MS-13, that he “had the opportunity to give evidence tending to show he was not part of MS-13, which he did not proffer.”
Abrego-Garcia’s attorneys further suggested that he was in danger in CECOT, but the judge wrote that his legal team hadn’t “clearly shown a likelihood that Abrego-Garcia will be tortured or killed in CECOT,” because that had “little evidence about conditions in CECOT itself, and instead based that concern on “allegations about conditions in different Salvadoran prisons.”
Acting Assistant Attorney General Civil Division for the Department of Justice Yaakov M. Roth, who was hired by President Donald Trump and presided over the suit, concluded that the motion for the restraining order “should be denied.”
