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.
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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.