A Guatemalan man who said he was deported to Mexico despite fearing he would be persecuted there was flown back to the US on Wednesday after a judge ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, his lawyer said.
Brian Murphy, a US district judge in Boston, Massachusetts, had ordered the man’s return after the US Department of Justice notified him that its claim that the man had expressly stated he was not afraid of being sent to Mexico was based on erroneous information.
In a court order last month, Murphy found that the deportation of the man, identified in legal filings only as OCG, likely “lacked any semblance of due process”.
A lawyer for OCG, Trina Realmuto, told the Guardian on Wednesday evening shortly after the man landed in Los Angeles: “We can confirm that OCG landed in the US a few hours ago. He made contact with the legal team while waiting in line to go through immigration. We expect that he will be detained, but we don’t know where yet. If DHS again seeks to deport him to a third country, the judge’s order requires that he be given due process, including notice and the opportunity to present a fear-based claim.”
In a court order last month, Murphy found that the deportation of the man, identified in legal filings only as OCG, likely “lacked any semblance of due process”.
“No one has ever suggested that OCG poses any sort of security threat,” Murphy wrote, adding: “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 went on to say: “At oral argument, defendants’ counsel confirmed that it is ‘the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture’ … The return of OCG poses a vanishingly small cost to make sure we can still claim to live up to that ideal.”
According to a court declaration, OCG, who had returned to Guatemala following his deportation to Mexico two months ago, said: “I have been living in hiding, in constant panic and constant fear.”
OCG, who is gay, had applied for asylum in the US last year after he was attacked multiple times in homophobic acts of violence in Guatemala.
“I don’t stay in any of the places I used to stay because the story is the same as ever here: gay people like me are targeted simply for who we are. This produces constant fear and panic,” OCG said in his court declaration from Guatemala, adding: “Living a normal life is impossible here, and I live in fear because of the past hateful incidences I experienced … There is no justice for me here.”
Following Murphy’s court order, Donald Trump’s administration said in a court filing on 28 May that federal immigration officials were working “to bring OCG back to the United States on an air charter operations flight return leg”.
Last month, Trump officials admitted to an “error” of falsely claiming that OCG was not afraid of being returned to Mexico.
“Upon further investigation, defendants cannot identify any officer who asked O.C.G. whether he had a fear of return to Mexico. Nor can defendants identify the officer who O.C.G. states ‘told [him] that he was being deported to Mexico’,” government lawyers said in a court filing.
The Guardian has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for comment.
Meanwhile, another federal judge ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration must give more than 100 migrants sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador a chance to challenge their deportations.
US district chief judge James Boasberg, in Washington DC, said people who were sent to the prison in March under an 18th-century wartime law haven’t been able to formally contest the removals or allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. He ordered the administration to work toward giving them a way to file those challenges.
The judge wrote that “significant evidence” has surfaced indicating that many of the migrants imprisoned in El Salvador are not connected to the gang “and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations”.
Boasberg gave the administration one week to come up with a manner in which the “at least 137” people can make those claims, even while they’re formally in the custody of El Salvador, in the latest milestone in the months-long legal saga.
Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting
