US ordered to return man mistakenly sent to El Salvador prison

Bob Van Voris, Bloomberg News on Apr 4, 2025

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WASHINGTON — A federal judge gave the government until the end of Monday to return a man to the U.S. after it said it had mistakenly sent him to a prison in El Salvador in an “administrative error.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Friday ordered the government to get Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center after finding it likely he was removed from the U.S. in violation of the law.

Xinis said Abrego Garcia had been granted a hold on removal to his native country in 2019. He was arrested unlawfully on March 12 and transported to El Salvador by March 15 without the proper legal process or justification, she said. The U.S. Justice Department says he is an MS-13 gang member and a danger to the community. His lawyer denies that Abrego Garcia belongs to a gang and said he is a sheet metal worker.

The order comes amid a tense standoff between the government and another federal judge who says the U.S. may have knowingly defied his directive to halt deportations of Venezuelans the Trump administration says are gang members. The conflict became especially fraught after President Donald Trump attacked the judge on that case on social media, calling for his impeachment and drawing a rebuke from the Supreme Court’s chief justice.

While U.S. residents shouldn’t be “wrongfully removed” from the country, the U.S. has a “strong public interest in not importing members of violent transnational gangs into the country,” the government wrote in a filing this week in Maryland federal court in Abrego Garcia’s case.

“The individual in question is a member of the brutal MS-13 gang,” Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement Friday. “Whether he is in El Salvador or a detention facility in the U.S., he will be locked up and off America’s streets.”

The government filed a notice of appeal with the court shortly after the order was issued.

Abrego Garcia, whose wife and young child are U.S. citizens, sued the U.S. after he was flown with more than 200 migrants on one of three planes to El Salvador. Two planes carried alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, sparking an intense legal fight that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review. Abrego Garcia was on a third plane not affected by that law, the government said.

The first two planes are the subject of the conflict between U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington and the government’s lawyers in that case.

(Zoe Tillman and David Voreacos contributed to this report.)