Bloomberg News: Trump Stance Spurns US History of Fixing Errant Deportations

This article appeared in BLOOMBERG GOVERNMENT on April 24, 2025.

The Trump administration’s resistance to returning Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the US after his mistaken deportation to El Salvador departs from the government’s practice of correcting similar errors in the past.

The Supreme Court earlier this month ordered the US to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return after the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged he was removed due to an administrative error.

A previous immigration court order barred the US from deporting Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, to his home country due to gang threats there.

President Donald Trump’s foot-dragging on returning him has sparked public debate, congressional visits, and frenzied legal proceedings. It also previews similar battles likely to come as the administration rushes to meet ambitious deportation goals.

“We know that the Trump administration doubles down when it makes mistakes,” UB Greensfelder attorney David Leopold, an adviser to the immigrants’ rights group America’s Voice, told reporters last week.

Leopold and other immigration lawyers described past incidents of Democratic and Republican administrations alike taking lengthy steps to correct previous mistaken deportations and say the Trump administration should follow that rubric.

Past Mistakes

Errant deportations have happened periodically over the years because of paperwork snafus, mistaken identity, and overzealous enforcement agents, immigration lawyers and former DHS officials say.

The process for returns depends on the case but typically involves DHS coordinating individuals’ flights and giving them provisional status upon arrival, said Jason Houser, a senior Customs and Border Protection and ICE official during Democratic administrations.

Leopold recalled a dispute that required a federal court’s intervention and played out much differently than the Abrego Garcia case. He was representing Don Turnbull, a Jamaican national who was deported while district court proceedings on his status were pending in 2004.

“His mother called me on a Friday morning and said, ‘They’re taking him,’” Leopold said in an interview. A federal judge in Ohio said the government “knowingly, willfully and surreptitiously deported Petitioner from the United States in direct contravention of the representations made to this Court.” ICE paid for his return ticket.

Even citizens have been thrown out of the US by mistake. The Government Accountability Office looked at the problem in 2021, finding ICE had deported as many as 70 US citizens from fiscal 2015 to March 2020.

One such case involved a natural-born US citizen with cognitive disabilities who spent “a rough few months” in Latin America before US officials brought him back, Sandweg said. The US later paid him $175,000 in a legal settlement.

The Supreme Court decided a 2009 case involving the rights of non-citizens facing deportation in favor of the government based in part on its claims that a policy existed to facilitate the return of individuals who won appeals at circuit courts. Justices found that immigrants wouldn’t suffer irreparable harm if they were deported with appeals still pending. When it emerged years later that no formal policy relating to such removals existed, ICE issued a 2012 policy memo outlining that process.

“Errors happen in legal systems,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center. “In order for those legal systems to maintain their integrity, there must be a way to correct those errors.”

Because Abrego Garcia faces torture in El Salvador detention facilities, the stakes are even higher, she said. “It’s not only disingenuous, but unimaginably cruel for the government to be playing these semantics games on whether or not they have the ability to facilitate a return when their own policy on the books for more than a decade actually outlines the way they could do so,” Altman said.

Cause Célèbre

The Abrego Garcia case stands out from past mistaken deportations because the Trump administration argues it has no power to return him to the US, and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has made the same claim.

But agencies like the State Department intervene all the time on behalf of people in trouble with a foreign government, said Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a partner at Murray Osorio and the lead attorney for Abrego Garcia. That includes people arrested for drug possession or others who must be returned after winning an appeal of a deportation order, he told reporters this week.

Every previous case of a wrongful deportation he’s worked on has been handled “quickly and quietly” by the government, Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

“They’re the ones who decided they were going to turn this into a knock-down, drag-out fight that goes to the Supreme Court,” he said. “Why are they trying to make a national cause célèbre out of this case?”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on such criticism, noting Abrego Garcia’s alleged membership in the gang MS-13.

“The president was always on the right side of this issue, to deport this illegal criminal from our community,” she said during a briefing Tuesday.

Even if Abrego Garcia is returned, he’ll likely land back in immigration court again, his legal team said, but the government will bear the burden of proof to show that he’d be safe if deported to El Salvador.

Sandweg warned that more mistakes are likely as the Trump administration aims to meet the president’s aggressive deportation goals. “That’s when you increase the risk of mistakes,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how this one happened, but this should not happen.”