Trump Administration Defies 9-0 Supreme Court Ruling To Return Wrongfully Deported Maryland Father, Identifies Original Error As New Policy

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration on Thursday declined to take any steps toward returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland sheet metal apprentice it had previously conceded in federal court was deported to El Salvador in error, hours after a unanimous Supreme Court instructed the government to facilitate his return.

The 9-0 ruling, issued by a bench that included three justices appointed by President Trump himself, ordered the administration to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia's release from the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the Salvadoran mega-prison to which he had been transferred on March 15 despite a 2019 immigration court order specifically prohibiting his removal to El Salvador on grounds of credible fear of persecution. The administration responded by indicating it had no intention of complying, on grounds that the word "facilitate" had been left insufficiently defined.

"He's an MS-13 person. He's a bad guy. We're not bringing him back," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, seated beside Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who clarified that his own definition of the word in question did not include releasing the man it concerned. The President added that the unanimous Supreme Court ruling had been a great victory for him personally, on grounds the President did not specify.

Mr. Abrego Garcia, who has lived in the United States since approximately 2011 and is married to a U.S. citizen with whom he is raising three children, including a son with autism, has never been charged with or convicted of any crime in the United States. The administration's assertion that he was a member of the MS-13 gang relied on a 2019 confidential informant tip referencing a hooded sweatshirt and a Chicago Bulls cap, evidence an immigration judge had previously declined to credit. Senior administration officials confirmed Thursday that no further evidence had been developed and that the new policy of declining to return wrongfully deported persons would apply prospectively as well.

Sources within the Justice Department, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the administration's reading of the unanimous order as a narrow one, under which "facilitate" obligated the government only to refrain from actively impeding a release that the government was free to make impossible by other means. Administration lawyers further argued that the courts had no authority over a person now in the custody of a foreign sovereign, an argument that omitted reference to the roughly $6 million the United States had agreed to pay El Salvador to warehouse the deportees in the first place.

At press time, the President was reviewing additional cases that might also benefit from the doctrine, under which a deportation, once executed, becomes its own justification.