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SCOTUS Orders Trump Admin to Return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to U.S. from El Salvador’s CECOT Prison

HeadlineApr 11, 2025

The Supreme Court has unanimously ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, after the Maryland resident was denied due process rights and deported to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador, infamous for human rights abuses including slave labor and torture. Abrego Garcia is a husband and father of three. His family fled El Salvador in 2011, when he was 16, after gang members extorted his family and threatened to kill him. The Trump administration has admitted Abrego Garcia was removed because of an “administrative error,” but argued it could not bring him back because he’s now in Salvadoran custody.

On Thursday, none of the court’s nine justices dissented from an unsigned opinion rejecting that argument and affirming U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s order that the Trump administration must “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. But the court remained vague on how exactly this would happen. He’s one of at least 278 men accused of being gang members and deported by the Trump administration to CECOT without due process, many of them solely on the basis that they had tattoos.

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