When he was a teenager, Kilmar Abrego Garcia fled from El Salvador to the United States after a local gang extorted the family business and threatened to kill him and his brother and rape his sisters.

Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally in 2011 at the age of 16.

According to the Associated Press, in 2019, based on information from a confidential informant, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alleged that he was certified gang member of MS-13, a claim he denied.

The result was that the immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of “well-founded fear of gang persecution."

Abrego Garcia was released and provided a work permit by the Department of Homeland Security. He and his wife raised three kids in Maryland where, until March, he was a union construction worker, and where he checked in with ICE annually.

Fast forward to this year. 

Abrego Garcia was taken by ICE for a second time. This time, without due process, he was shipped off to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the very place the former judge ruled in 2019 that he was not allowed to be deported to.

Abrego Garcia’s case has wended its way through the courts all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return to the U.S. But instead of doing so, the administration argued that the Supreme Court ruled in its favor.

Vin Bonventre, the Jackson Distinguished professor of law at Albany Law School, discussed the case and its consequences with Capital Tonight host Susan Arbetter.