A father deported “by mistake” to prison in El Salvador cannot be repatriated, Trump admin admits

The Trump administration would attribute the expulsion of Abrego Garcia, a family father from Maryland, to an ‘administrative error’, thus sending him to one of the most brutal prisons in El Salvador.

On March 15, Garcia was transferred from Maryland to El Salvador by ICE, even though the agency was aware of his protection against deportation to El Salvador, according to documents filed by the Trump administration and reported by The Atlantic.

Garcia found himself by mistake on board one of the three planes transporting migrants, mainly Salvadorans and Venezuelans, to a huge prison in Salvador, where they were sent due to their alleged affiliations with gangs.

According to The Atlantic, Abrego Garcia arrived in the United States in 2011, at the age of 16, to escape the threat of gangs in El Salvador.

A few years later, a judge granted him a protection status called ‘deportation suspension’, estimating that Garcia was at an elevated risk of being targeted by Salvadoran gangs, with threats of torture or death, if he was sent back to his country.

The Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) is a high-security prison located in El Salvador, inaugurated in February 2023. CECOT is one of the largest prisons in Central America, with a capacity of 40,000 inmates.

However, human rights organizations denounce inhumane detention conditions. 

These conditions have sparked criticism due to human rights violations and premature deaths among detainees.

According to court documents reported by The Atlantic, Garcia’s future appears uncertain, with the Trump administration admitting that American courts do not have jurisdiction to order his return from the Terrorist Detention Center, where he is currently imprisoned.

According to the White House, the Trump administration paid around $6 million to the Salvadoran government to accept deportees. This amount was part of a cooperation agreement on security matters, aimed at facilitating the management of migrant deportations.

However, the Trump administration received many criticisms for not limiting deportations to only dangerous criminals, including errors such as mistakenly attributing ordinary tattoos to gang tattoos to justify deportations.