For what appears to be the first time, Donald Trump’s administration will “facilitate” the return of a “wrongfully” deported immigrant following a court order.
A gay Guatemalan man referred to as “O.C.G” in court documents says he survived sexual violence and kidnapping in Mexico on his way to the southern border last year. But federal immigration authorities failed to screen him for a credible fear assessment before deporting him back to the same country where he was raped and held for ransom.
Last week, District Judge Brian Murphy ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return — echoing court orders in two other high-profile immigration cases involving “wrongfully” deported immigrants.
“In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped,” Murphy wrote.
On Wednesday, lawyers for the Department of Justice said Homeland Security officials are preparing to return him to the United States — and potentially release him from custody for humanitarian reasons.
A flight crew in Phoenix is working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s air division to put him on a charter flight, according to court filings.
Murphy’s ruling marks at least the third time that the Trump administration has been ordered to return a wrongly deported immigrant.
Last month, a Trump-appointed federal judge found that the government’s removal of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man named in court documents as “Cristian” violated a court settlement intended to protect young immigrants who have pending asylum claims.
The Supreme Court has also unanimously agreed that the Trump administration “illegally” deported Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father and husband living in Maryland. Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador as a teenager in 2011. He has been imprisoned in his home country since March 15.
More than a month after the highest court’s decision, the Trump administration has yet to facilitate his return, and is engaged in a tense legal battle to avoid answering what steps, if any, it is taking to bring him back, and arguing that the administration does not need to answer to questions from a federal judge about its arrangement with El Salvador.
The administration has filed a motion to try to dismiss that case altogether.
O.C.G.’s case is part of a wider class-action lawsuit targeting the administration’s so-called third-country removals, in which immigrants are deported to somewhere other than their home country. Murphy has blocked removing those immigrants without adequate notice — which he alleges the administration defied when authorities sent a group of immigrants to South Sudan.
Murphy, who was appointed by Joe Biden, has faced a barrage of attacks from the White House, which labeled him a “far-left activist” who is trying to “protect the violent criminal illegal immigrants.” Trump called him “absolutely out of control” and accused him of “hurting our country.”
This week, the judge accused government attorneys of “manufacturing chaos” surrounding the case.
Immigration officials initially claimed that O.C.G. had agreed to be sent to Mexico, but the administration later admitted in court documents that their claim was based on erroneous information. An immigration official wrote in a sworn statement that “ICE was unable to identify an officer or officers” who had even asked the man about his credible fear.
“How was this mistake made?” Murphy asked government lawyers during a hearing last week.
“This is a really big deal,” he said. “It is a big deal to lie to a court under oath. It is an extraordinarily big deal to do so when there are matters of national importance at stake. I take this extremely seriously.”
He suggested he could call Homeland Security officials into court to testify under oath.
“While mistakes obviously happen, the events leading up to this decision are troubling,” Murphy wrote in his order on May 23. “The Court was given false information, upon which it relied twice, to the detriment of a party at risk of serious and irreparable harm.”
Lawyers for the Guatemalan man are likely to “succeed in showing that his removal lacked any semblance of due process,” according to Murphy.
