An appeals court has ordered the Trump administration to return a man wrongfully deported to El Salvador to the US and to explain how it is complying in a ruling apparently designed to break a pattern of apparent government defiance of judicial orders.
The US court of appeals for the second circuit in New York also required the government to provide a declaration of the current whereabouts and custodial status of Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, who was deported on 7 May less than half an hour after the court had expressly barred his removal.
Tuesday’s order seemed intended to forestall a repeat of the long saga surrounding the case of Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported to his native El Salvador in March, in violation of a 2019 immigration court order preventing his repatriation there on grounds of possible persecution.
Ábrego García remained in custody in El Salvador’s sprawling Cecot terrorism confinement facility for weeks while administration officials claimed they were unable to comply with a court order to facilitate his return. He was eventually returned to the US this month after the government secured a federal indictment accusing him of being a co-conspirator in a people smuggling ring.
Melgar-Salmeron, 31, a married father-of-four who lives in Virginia, is believed by relatives to be in custody in a high-security prison after he was deported despite the government having given the appeals court an “express assurance” that it would not schedule a deportation flight for him until the following day while his case was heard.
In the event, Melgar-Salmeron left on a flight for El Salvador 28 minutes after the order was issued. A court filing for the government blamed “a confluence of administrative errors”.
In addition to ordering the government to facilitate his return, Tuesday’s order also gave officials a week to file a “supplemental declaration from an individual with personal knowledge, addressing … the current physical location and custodial status of Petitioner; and .…what steps the government will take, and when, to facilitate his return to the United States”.
The court denied an application by Melgar-Salmeron’s lawyers for the appointment of a special master for the case, saying that the government counsel who had given assurance that he would not be removed “took reasonable and diligent steps to ensure removal would not occur in violation of that assurance”.
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In a previous filing, the government detailed a series of communications lapses between an Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) office in Buffalo, New York, where his case was being monitored, and another in Louisiana, where he was being held.
Melgar-Salmeron was previously affiliated with the MS-13 street gang but, according to his lawyer, his since renounced his connection. He also served two years in jail for illegal possession of an unregistered sawn-off shotgun before he was placed in immigration detention, according to the New York Times.
His is one of four cases, along with that of Ábrego-García, of people being removed in breach of court orders.
Also among the four is Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a 20-year-old Venezuelan, who was deported along with about 240 other men from Venezuela and taken to the Cecot facility after US authorities declared them to be members of Tren de Aragua. A Maryland court later ruled that he had been improperly removed in violation of an earlier settlement forbidding his removal while his immigration case was pending.
The fourth case is that of a Guatemalan immigrant identified only as “OCG,” who was deported to Mexico, despite claiming to have been raped and kidnapped in that country.