The Supreme Court unanimously ruled Thursday that the Trump administration must bring back a Maryland man it mistakenly deported to and had imprisoned in El Salvador.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor rejected the administration’s argument—that it couldn’t be held accountable for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia because he was no longer in the country—as “plainly wrong.”
The administration had petitioned the Supreme Court to try to get out of a lower court’s order requiring Garcia’s return, but the Supreme Court said it could find “no reason recognized by the law” for the White House’s request to be granted.
“The only argument the Government offers in support of its request, that United States courts cannot grant relief once a deportee crosses the border, is plainly wrong,” Sotomayor writes. “The Government’s argument, moreover, 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… That view refutes itself.”
Despite the Trump administration admitting Garcia’s deportation and imprisonment was an “administrative error,” it refused to correct the mistake, and several officials bent over backwards in public trying to justify it.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted that Garcia was a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, yet didn’t provide any evidence to support that assertion.
Vice President J.D. Vance, meanwhile, called Garcia “convicted,” but failed to note any charges against him—let alone convictions.
Garcia has been incarcerated in El Salvador for nearly a month. At no point in that time, Sotomayor writes, has the Trump administration cited any “basis in law for Abrego Garcia’s warrantless arrest, his removal to El Salvador, or his confinement in a Salvadoran prison. Nor could it.”
