DHS did it again.
Six months after wrongly deporting a teen migrant to El Salvador despite a court order prohibiting his removal — and less than one month after un-deporting and bringing him back — the Department of Homeland Security admitted to a federal judge that it has now deported the 19-year-old a second time.
DHS didn’t explain the screwup but said it confirmed Emerson Omar Avalos-Lopez, identified in court documents by the initials ELA, was deported to El Salvador on Tuesday.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears not to have even known it had deported someone under court protection until Mr. Avalos-Lopez, once on the ground in El Salvador, borrowed a stranger’s phone and called relatives in the U.S. to tell them what happened.
They alerted his lawyer, who told DHS.
“Defendants’ second unlawful removal of ELA not only violates multiple court orders, but it also places him back in the country where he fears persecution in an extremely vulnerable state, deprived of his cellphone, clothing, paperwork and other belongings,” Brian Burgess, the lawyer, told the federal judge overseeing the case.
He asked the judge to find Homeland Security officials, and possibly the Justice Department lawyers representing them, in contempt of court.
DHS, in a statement, said Mr. Avalos-Lopez sneaked across the border in 2023 and was caught and released by the Biden administration.
The department said he came to an ICE office in February and was arrested. An immigration judge ordered him removed, and he was ousted on March 13. He was brought back on Aug. 7 and re-deported on Tuesday.
DHS didn’t explain why he was booted again, but in its court filing acknowledged he was part of the class action settlement that offered protection against deportation to migrants who came as children, have since turned 18, have filed asylum claims and haven’t had them ruled on yet.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, in an order last year, forbade deportation of those migrants until Homeland Security had made a ruling on the merits of their asylum applications.
Mr. Avalos-Lopez’s removal is part of an embarrassing string of erroneous deportations for ICE under President Trump.
The most prominent was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, also sent back to El Salvador, despite an immigration judge’s order specifically prohibiting him from being deported to that country.
Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez, a California mom, was brought back in April after being deported in February. She had lived in the U.S. for 27 years and for the last 13 of those years had been protected from deportation under DACA, the Obama-era program that granted amnesty to illegal immigrant “Dreamers.”
U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins called her deportation a “flagrant violation” of both the Constitution and DACA.
Immigration lawyers said there’s no good count of how many people have been wrongly deported, nor even a complete tally of how many have been brought back, either under court order or after admission of error by DHS.
Mr. Burgess, the lawyer for Mr. Avalos-Lopez, didn’t respond to an inquiry for this story.
In his letter to the judge on Wednesday, he said the teenager still hasn’t gotten a ruling on his asylum application.
After he was first deported, he said he wanted to come back and wait for an adjudication. The lawyer told DHS on June 15 that Mr. Avalos-Lopez wished to return, and he was brought back on Aug. 7.
He was held in detention in Louisiana and was scheduled for a video psychological evaluation on Tuesday as part of his asylum application. On Tuesday morning, ICE sent emails letting the lawyer know the appointment was canceled.
“He is no longer at our facility, so we will not be able to conduct todays [sic] meeting,” the detention center said in one of the emails.
Mr. Burgess said the second removal violated three distinct court orders forbidding deportation of migrants covered by the class action settlement.
He asked the judge to order DHS to reveal who ordered the second deportation, and why it happened.
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