(WASHINGTON) — The attorney for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was deported in error to El Salvador, said Tuesday that he expects Abrego Garcia to be returned to the U.S.
Abrego Garcia — despite having protected legal status preventing his deportation to El Salvador, where he escaped political violence in 2011 — was sent to that country’s notorious CECOT mega-prison following what the government said was an “administrative error.”
Trump administration officials have said Abrego Garcia is a member of the criminal gang MS-13, but his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg has disputed that, saying the government has provided no proof of their allegations.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration to return Abrego Garcia from El Salvador by Monday at midnight, before Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday issued a temporary administrative stay delaying the midnight deadline in order to give the court more time to consider the arguments presented by both sides.
“[The order] just means that he recognized that the Supreme Court needs a little bit of time to do its work,” Sandoval-Moshenberg told ABC News. “I have every expectation that the Supreme Court will rule quickly and will rule in our favor, because when push comes to shove, this is not an exceptional case. The only exceptional thing has been the way in which the government has dug in its heels on making right what they messed up.”
“Jennifer is really worried,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said of Abrego Garcia’s wife. “She expects and I expect that we are going to get him back.”
In the filing earlier Monday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that a federal court cannot order a president to engage in foreign diplomacy, which he says is implicitly involved in any potential return of Abrego Garcia.
“The Constitution charges the President, not federal district courts, with the conduct of foreign diplomacy and protecting the Nation against foreign terrorists, including by effectuating their removal,” Sauer wrote. “And this order sets the United States up for failure. The United States cannot guarantee success in sensitive international negotiations in advance, least of all when a court imposes an absurdly compressed, mandatory deadline that vastly complicates the give-and-take of foreign-relations negotiations.”
Sandoval-Moshenberg, however, said that the government has not provided evidence that it would be impossible to return his client.
“I don’t think there’s anyone in this whole country that doesn’t recognize the glaring truth, which is that if we picked up the phone and just asked, he’d be on a plane in a day or two,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
Referring to the agreement El Salvador signed with the Trump administration to house migrant detainees, Sandoval-Moshenberg said, “El Salvador is doing all of this because we’re paying them $6 million to do it, and we have an agreement with them.”
“The U.S. government is acting as if the Salvadoran government chose, for Salvador and legal reasons, to arrest him and incarcerate him,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “That couldn’t be farther from the case.”
Sandoval-Moshenberg called Abrego Garcia’s arrest by U.S. authorities a “targeted action.”
“They went out, they stopped his car, they pulled him over, they pulled him out of the car, and they arrested him,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “And he was actually with his 5-year-old child at the time, and they made him call his wife to come pick up the kid. This was a targeted action.”
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