A Guatemalan man who was deported to Mexico by the Trump administration was returned to the U.S. this week, his lawyers confirmed to Fox News on Thursday, marking the first known instance of the Trump administration complying with a judge’s orders to return an individual removed from the U.S. based on erroneous information.
The individual, identified only as O.C.G, was returned to the U.S. via commercial flight, lawyers confirmed, after being deported to Mexico in March.
The news comes one week after lawyers for the Justice Department told U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy that they were working to charter a plane to secure the return of the individual, identified only as O.C.G., to U.S. soil.
Murphy had ruled that O.C.G., a Guatemalan migrant, had been deported to Mexico earlier this year without due process and despite his stated fears of persecution, and ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
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Additionally, Murphy told laywers for the administration that O.C.G. had not been given the chance to contest his removal to a country where he could face threats of torture, a right afforded under U.S. and international law.
O.C.G. was previously held for ransom and raped in Mexico but was not afforded the chance to assert those fears prior to his removal, Murphy noted in his order, citing submissions from O.C.G.'s attorneys.
"In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped," Murphy said earlier this month, noting that the removal process "lacked any semblance of due process."
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"The return of O.C.G. poses a vanishingly small cost to make sure we can still claim to live up to that ideal," Murphy said in his order.
Lawyers for the Trump administration told the court last week that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Operations Phoenix Field Office made contact over the weekend with O.C.G.’s attorneys and are "currently working with ICE Air to bring O.C.G. back to the United States on an Air Charter Operations (ACO) flight return leg."
That appears to have happened, and O.C.G. was flown via commercial airline to the U.S. on Wednesday.
The news comes amid a broader court fight centered on Trump's use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – an 18th-century wartime law it invoked earlier this year to deport certain migrants more quickly. Many were sent to CECOT, El Salvador's maximum-security prison.
To date, the Trump administration has not complied with federal court orders to facilitate the return of those individuals to the U.S., even individuals who were deported in what the administration has acknowledged was an administrative error.
Unlike the migrants at CECOT, however, O.C.G. had not been detained in Mexico.
The Trump administration did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment. They did not immediately respond to questions about whether the administration plans to follow suit in other cases in which a federal judge ordered the administration to return an individual deemed to have been wrongfully deported.
The news comes just hours after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to provide all migrants removed to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act an opportunity to seek habeas relief to contest their removal, as well as the opportunity to challenge their alleged gang status, which was the basis for their removal under the law.
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Judge Boasberg also gave the Trump administration one week to submit to the court information explaining how it plans to facilitate the habeas relief to migrants currently being held at CECOT.
That ruling is almost certain to provoke a high-stakes legal standoff with the administration, and comes as Trump officials have railed against Judge Boasberg and others who have ruled in ways seen as unfavorable to the administration as so-called "activist judges."
Trump called for Boasberg's impeachment earlier this year, prompting Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to issue a rare public statement of rebuke.
"America’s asylum system was never intended to be used as a de facto amnesty program or a catch-all, get-out-of-deportation-free card," DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement over the weekend.