The White House is angrily deflecting questions over how a Salvadoran man who had sought asylum in the United States was sent back to his home country despite having been granted protected legal status.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the deportation by claiming Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a leader of the notorious MS-13 gang who had engaged in human trafficking.
“Foreign terrorists do not have legal protections in the United States of America anymore, and it is within the President’s executive authority and power to deport these heinous individuals from American communities,” she said.
Just a day earlier, Justice Department lawyers admitted in a court filing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had mistakenly arrested and deported Abrego Garcia, despite being aware that he had been granted a form of protected legal status called “withholding of removal” in 2019 after an immigration judge found he would likely be targeted by gangs for persecution and torture if sent back to El Salvador, the place he’d fled when he came to the U.S. in 2011.
According to court documents, Abrego Garcia has no criminal record in the United States and is married to an American citizen with whom he has a 5-year-old special needs child.
But this lack of criminal history in America didn’t stop the Trump administration from grabbing him up and putting him on a plane to the exact place the government had been forbidden from sending him.
Trump administration lawyers claim the deportation of Abrego Garcia and his subsequent incarceration in El Salvador’s CECOT prison was the result of an “administrative error” that can’t be remedied because the government is powerless to get him back from the Salvadoran government despite a close relationship between Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele and President Donald Trump.
Asked about the admitted “administrative error” at a press briefing on Tuesday, Leavitt said the administration “maintains the position” that Abrego Garcia “was a member of the brutal and vicious MS-13 gang” and claimed there is “credible intelligence” to “prove” that he was “involved in human trafficking” as a “leader” of MS-13, which the Trump administration has designated as a “foreign terrorist organization.”
Leavitt’s claim that Abrego Garcia was a “leader” of MS-13 with related criminal convictions — despite his lack of a criminal record in the United States — came just hours after Vice President JD Vance took to X (formerly Twitter) to attack a journalist from Politico who had pointed out that Abrego Garcia was not “convicted” of anything but had only been accused by an informant of being a gang member in 2019.
Seeking to justify the deportation, Vance also wrote that Abrego Garcia “apparently had multiple traffic violations for which he failed to appear in court” and called him “a real winner.”
The White House press secretary was pressed further to justify her and the vice president’s claims that the mistakenly deported man had been a convicted gang member later on in the Tuesday press briefing by explaining what evidence she’d seen to support such assertions.
Instead of elaborating further, she pivoted to attacking reporting on the case by The Atlantic and complained that the magazine’s headline used in a story about the mistaken deportation failed to describe Abrego Garcia as “an illegal criminal who broke our nation’s immigration laws.”
“These are vicious criminals. This is a vicious gang, and I wish that the media would spend just a second of the same time you have spent trying to litigate each and every individual of this gang who has been deported from our country as the innocent Americans whose lives have been lost at the hands of these brutal criminals,” she said.
