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The Trump administration on Saturday confirmed to a federal judge that a Maryland man who was wrongly deported last month remains confined in a notorious prison in El Salvador.
However, the White House filing did not address the judge’s demands that the administration detail the steps it was taking to return Kilmar Abrego García to the United States. The White House only confirmed that García was under the authority of the El Salvador government.
The administration’s confirmation of García’s location was confirmed to the court by Michael G Kozak, who identified himself in the filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in the state department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.
The filing comes one day after a US government attorney struggled in a hearing to provide the US district judge Paula Xinis with any information about García’s whereabouts. Xinis issued an order after Friday’s hearing requiring the administration to disclose García’s “current physical location and custodial status” and “what steps, if any, Defendants have taken (and) will take, and when, to facilitate” his return.
“It is my understanding based on official reporting from our Embassy in San Salvador that Abrego García is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador,” Kozak’s statement said. “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.”
Kozak’s statement did not address the judge’s latter requirements.
Xinis was exasperated Friday with the government’s lack of information.
“Where is he and under whose authority?” the judge asked in the hearing. “I’m not asking for state secrets. All I know is that he’s not here. The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: Where is he?”
The US supreme court on Thursday upheld the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego García’s return to the US, after Abrego García and his family filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of his summary deportation on 15 March.
Abrego García has had a US work permit since 2019 but was stopped and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers on 12 March and questioned about alleged gang affiliation. He was deported on one of three high-profile deportation flights to El Salvador made up chiefly of Venezuelans whom the government accuses of being gang members and whom it assumed special powers to expel without a hearing.
Abrego García’s wife, US citizen Jennifer Vásquez Sura, has not been able to speak to him since he was flown to his native El Salvador last month and imprisoned. She has been rallying outside court and has urged their supporters to keep fighting for him “and all the Kilmars out there whose stories are still waiting to be heard”.
