29-05-2025
Trump administration says it is working to return Guatemalan man who was deported without due process
The Department of Homeland Security is working to place an immigrant who was improperly deported to Mexico onto a charter flight back to the United States, the Trump administration told a judge on Wednesday.
The revelation is the first public sign that the Trump administration may comply with court orders to facilitate the return of at least one of the men who were found to have been deported without legally required due process. Still, the administration has resisted orders from two other judges to seek the return of two other immigrants whose deportations were ruled improper.
The new development came in the case of a Guatemalan man who is identified in court papers only by the initials O.C.G. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ruled that officials must take 'all immediate steps' to facilitate his return.
O.C.G. has claimed that he was raped and otherwise targeted for being gay during a previous stay in Mexico. Murphy, a Biden appointee, found that he wasn't provided meaningful notice or an opportunity to raise those fears about torture or persecution when the Trump administration hurriedly deported him to Mexico in February.
Federal law and a U.S.-ratified treaty bar deportations to countries where an immigrant will face torture.
After the U.S. deported O.C.G., Mexico in turn deported him to his home country of Guatemala, where he has also faced persecution and threats of violence. His lawyers said he is hiding there at his sister's home.
Immigration officials now say they are arranging a way for him to fly back to the U.S.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement office in Phoenix 'is currently working with ICE Air to bring O.C.G. back to the United States on an Air Charter Operations (ACO) flight return leg,' federal officials told Murphy in a court filing late Wednesday.
The status update is a marked contrast from how the administration has thus far handled the cases of two other deportees whom the administration has been ordered to try to return: Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Daniel Lozano-Camargo. Both men were deported in March to El Salvador, where they remain in prison.
The Supreme Court in April noted that Abrego Garcia's deportation was 'illegal' because it violated a 2019 immigration court order barring officials from deporting him to El Salvador. The justices affirmed a federal district judge's order for the administration to facilitate his return.
A different federal judge found that Lozano-Camargo's deportation violated a court-approved settlement agreement that protected certain immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors. A federal appeals court upheld the judge's order to facilitate his return.
But the Trump administration has taken no public steps to try to bring Abrego Garcia or Lozano-Camargo back to the U.S., even as Trump himself claimed that he could get Abrego Garcia back by making a single phone call.
The administration also did not comply with another judge's order in March requiring officials to reroute two planes that were then flying a group of deportees out of the country.
Murphy denied a request from the government on Monday to reconsider his orders to bring back O.C.G. The judge added that the administration had repeatedly violated a separate ruling he had issued when it put several immigrants on a flight to South Sudan last week, in an attempt to hurriedly deport the men.
