By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A federal judge has ordered the administration of President Donald Trump to facilitate the return of a second man sent to a prison in El Salvador back to the United States, saying his deportation violated a court settlement.
Late Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher in Baltimore said the settlement agreement that she approved in November on behalf of thousands of migrants required immigration authorities to process the asylum application by the 20-year-old Venezuelan man, identified only as Cristian, before deporting him.
The ruling could set up another showdown between the Trump administration and federal courts over immigration enforcement. The administration has also been ordered to facilitate the return of a Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who it acknowledged was deported in error, but a judge has said that the government is doing little to comply.
The administration claims that Abrego Garcia, Cristian and more than 250 other people who were sent to a Salvadoran prison beginning last month are gang members and that it has the power to remove them under the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law adopted in 1798.
Gallagher considered only whether Cristian’s deportation violated the settlement and not whether the law was properly invoked, which is at issue in Abrego Garcia’s and other migrants’ cases. The settlement applies to thousands of migrants who came to the United States unaccompanied as children and have applied for asylum.
“A core purpose of the Settlement Agreement would be nullified if Class Members with pending asylum applications could be summarily removed from the United States and thus rendered ineligible for asylum,” wrote Gallagher, a Trump appointee.
The White House, the Department of Homeland Security and lawyers who represent the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
Cristian is a class member in the 2019 lawsuit, which claimed that immigration authorities were deporting migrants before they received a final determination on their applications for asylum.
Asylum is a form of humanitarian protection extended to people who are in the U.S. illegally but would likely face persecution if sent back to their home countries.
The Trump administration argued that deporting Cristian did not violate the settlement agreement because he had been deemed an “alien enemy” under the wartime law, making him ineligible for asylum.
Gallagher on Wednesday said the settlement applies to anyone with a pending asylum application, and not only those who are eligible for asylum.
The judge ordered the Trump administration to make “a good faith request” to the government of El Salvador, seeking Cristian’s release to U.S. custody so he could return to the United States. She also ordered the administration not to deport other migrants covered by the settlement.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed sending 252 Venezuelans deported from the U.S. and imprisoned in his country to Venezuela, in exchange for taking political prisoners held by that country.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Lisa Shumaker)
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