White House digs in after mistakenly deporting Maryland father to El Salvador [View all]

Source: The Independent

White House digs in after mistakenly deporting Maryland father to El Salvador

The Justice Department is arguing that the U.S. government is powerless to ask the Salvadoran government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to American custody

Andrew Feinberg
in Washington, D.C.
Tuesday 01 April 2025 19:18 BST

The White House is angrily deflecting questions over how a Salvadoran man who had sought asylum in the United States was sent back to his home country despite having been granted protected legal status.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the deportation by claiming Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a leader of the notorious MS-13 gang who had engaged in human trafficking.

“Foreign terrorists do not have legal protections in the United States of America anymore, and it is within the President's executive authority and power to deport these heinous individuals from American communities,” she said.

Just a day earlier, Justice Department lawyers admitted in a court filing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had mistakenly arrested and deported Abrego Garcia, despite being aware that he had been granted a form of protected legal status called “withholding of removal” in 2019 after an immigration judge found he would likely be targeted by gangs for persecution and torture if sent back to El Salvador, the place he’d fled when he came to the U.S. in 2011.

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Read more: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/el-salvador-maryland-father-garcia-deported-b2725517.html

Alternate link: https://news.yahoo.com/news/white-house-digs-mistakenly-deporting-174312254.html