Outrage grows over Maryland man's mistaken deportation

WCCO-AM / 830 WCCO

Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador. President Donald Trump’s administration has acknowledged that Abrego Garcia's deportation was an “administrative error,” but is against returning him to the U.S.

Transcript

00:00So, when he was arrested in 2019 by ICE, there was an anonymous tip, basically, one of these

00:14confidential informants who tagged him as a member of the MS-13.

00:21There was never any evidence other than that anonymous tip brought forward against him.

00:26And one of the things that we pointed out is that the supposed click within MS-13 that

00:31he's supposedly a member of is actually based out of Long Island, New York, and he's never

00:35even been to Long Island.

00:40When Kilmar was first arrested by ICE, he had a preliminary hearing, and the immigration

00:45judge, due to the anonymous tip, due to the gang allegation, the immigration judge denied

00:50his release.

00:51He said, basically, more or less said, we don't know what's going on here, so I'm going

00:53to deny your release.

00:57That was appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which did not set it aside, which

01:02affirmed the judge's order.

01:04However, Kilmar then went on to have a trial in front of the immigration judge, and he

01:09won his trial, and the government chose not to appeal.

01:13The government basically just let it at that.

01:21If you think about the family separation debacle during the first Trump administration,

01:26our government spent six years traipsing across the mountainside villages of Guatemala looking

01:32for these deported parents who were separated from their kids.

01:38This is what we do when we make a mistake, and in the family separation case, they found

01:44a great number of people that didn't find all of them, but they found a great number

01:47of them, and they brought them back.

01:50What's amazing about this case, what's new and so terrifying is not the fact that a mistake

01:57was made and someone was wrongfully deported, but the fact that the government's response

02:01to that is, well, too bad for him.

02:03We're not going to do anything about it.

02:04We have no obligations here.

02:06We don't want to.

02:07A, we don't want to, and B, you can't make us.

02:15He was granted something called withholding of removal.

02:18That's a country-specific form of protection.

02:20What it means is that the government was prohibited from deporting him to El Salvador.

02:26He was given a legal work permit by the Department of Homeland Security and is allowed to work

02:30in the United States while he's here and has been working pursuant to that work permit.

02:36If the government now thinks they don't agree with that state of affairs, there's two things

02:41they can do.

02:42One, they can go back before the immigration court and seek an order removing the withholding

02:52of removal.

02:53That's a legal process that they could have gone through, or if they wanted to deport

02:57him to any other country, if they wanted to deport him to Panama, they could have filed

03:00charges in immigration court seeking a removal order as to Panama, and then he would have

03:05had the opportunity to seek protection if appropriate or not.

03:09Those are the two legal processes that they could have done.

03:12What's more, they could have detained him in a detention center while they went through

03:17those processes.

03:18Again, he would have had the opportunity to seek release on bond.

03:21Again, an immigration judge would have had to consider whether or not he's a danger to

03:26the community, he's a flight risk, or is amenable to release on bond.

03:29Again, he would have had a trial on the new charges.

03:32That's the right way of doing these things, and that's what they completely blew off.

03:40It's a terrifying case.

03:41I mean, the government makes mistakes, it happens, right?

03:45But if the government can make a mistake, and as long as they do it quickly enough,

03:50you have no recourse whatsoever, that's something that we should all be very scared about.

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