The U.S. Supreme Court instructed U.S. immigration officials to facilitate “as soon as possible” the return of a union sheet metal worker who was erroneously deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there, upholding a lower federal court order calling for his immediate extradition back to the U.S. 

However, it was not immediately clear how soon officials would comply with the order.

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, 29, is an apprentice sheet metal worker and member of the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) Local 100 in Suitland, Md. He was arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)  officials on March 12 after completing a shift at a jobsite in Baltimore and picking up his 5-year-old son, his attorneys wrote. Agency officials then  sent him to El Salvador, where he was confined in the Terrorism Confinement Center, the notorious maximum security prison known as CECOT.

“In his pursuit of the life promised by the American dream, Brother Kilmar was literally helping to build this great country,” SMART General President Michael Coleman said in a statement. “What did he get in return? Arrest and deportation to a nation whose prisons face outcry from human rights organizations.”

Abrego Garcia is originally from El Salvador, and entered the U.S. illegally around 2011 while fleeing gang violence, according to his attorneys. Authorities have claimed that he is a member of the gang MS-13, but his attorneys deny the assertion, pointing to his lack of a criminal record—contending that unauthorized entry into the U.S. is a civil, rather than criminal, matter and saying that officials have never presented any evidence to back up their gang claims. 

Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, said she had not heard from him since he called her from a Texas ICE facility saying he was being sent to CECOT. But she said she saw him in photos from the prison with his head shaved, kneeling on the ground with his arms over his head and being “frog-walked” in shackles by masked guards.

“My heart sank,” she wrote in an affidavit. 

Removal Prohibited

In 2019, police took Abrego Garcia into custody while he was seeking work outside a Home Depot store. The incident led to an immigration judge issuing a grant prohibiting his removal to El Salvador because of the dangers he faced there and allowing him to work in the U.S. Since then, he has continued to check in annually with ICE officials as required by the court, records show. 

Robert Cerna, Texas-based agency acting field office director of enforcement and removal operations, admitted in court filings that Abrego-Garcia was removed “through administrative error.” He claimed ICE was unaware of the grant prohibiting Abrego Garcia’s removal.

A federal judge in Maryland ordered officials on April 4 to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by April 7. Despite the admitted error, U.S. government attorneys claimed that officials “have no independent authority” to bring him back because he is now being held by the El Salvadoran government. They requested a stay of the order directing them to return him. 

A panel of appeals court judges denied the government request on April 7, maintaining the deadline for officials to return Abrego Garcia. The same day, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees appeals from Maryland, granted a temporary stay.

“We are devastated for Kilmar and his family that his return has been delayed,” Coleman said. “But our call remains unchanged: The Trump administration must bring Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia home and grant him the due process that is his right.”

The Supreme Court ruled on April 10 to uphold the original order, other than the already-passed deadline. District Court Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland, who had issued the original order for Abrego Garcia’s return directed officials to explain his current location and custodial status, steps they have taken to facilitate his immediate return to the U.S. and other steps they will take. 

Despite the rulings, attorneys for the government missed the deadline to provide the information and said officials “cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review.”

Along with the unsigned order, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a statement criticizing the government for removing Abrego Garcia with “no basis in law.”

The justices wrote that “instead of hastening to correct its egregious error, the government dismissed it as an ‘oversight,’” 

They added that the government’s argument for permission to leave Abrego Garcia in El Salvador “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.”