ICE told a federal judge on Thursday that it was scrambling to try to bring back a migrant teenager whom it had wrongly deported to El Salvador — for the second time in six months.
The 19-year-old, identified in court documents by initials ELA but by the Department of Homeland Security as Emerson Omar Avalos-Lopez, is part of a class-action settlement that forbids the government from deporting migrants who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied children and who have pending asylum claims that haven’t been ruled on.
Federal officials told the court that the man’s computer records were altered to remove the flag in his file showing he was part of the settlement.
The result was that Mr. Avalos-Lopez was sent to El Salvador on Tuesday. Neither his family nor his lawyer knew where he was until he landed, managed to borrow a stranger’s cellphone, and made a call back to relatives in America.
He’d gone through the same process in March, when he was first deported, only for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to realize he shouldn’t have been. They brought him back early in August, and he was here for less than a month before ICE did it again.
Mr. Avalos-Lopez’s lawyer Kevin DeJong, in an email to the Justice Department lawyers handling the case, said ICE had denied the teen “any semblance of dignity.”
“ICE cancelled a scheduled mental health evaluation, took away his belongings, and removed him for the second time to the country from which he fled persecution,” Mr. DeJong said.
U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher ordered the government to explain itself, which it did with declarations from an ICE officer and an employee at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the legal immigration agency that oversees asylum petitions.
The USCIS analyst said Mr. Avalos-Lopez had a pending asylum case but he missed two separate appointments last year to have his biometric information taken. The employee said that should have caused his case to be closed.
He said he told ICE on Aug. 12 the agency would proceed to close the case, but he told the judge that hasn’t been done yet. He said the actual closure wasn’t part of his job and he didn’t offer an explanation for why it wasn’t done.
The ICE officer said his agency removed the flag warning against deportation in Mr. Avalos-Lopez’s file on Aug. 16, based on the USCIS claim that it was proceeding to close the file. ICE’s national case management unit removed the warning, so deportation officers didn’t know he was still protected.
Now the agency is looking at how to get him back.
“ICE is facilitating ELA’s return and is in the process of looking at all available flight options,” Supervisory Detention Deportation Officer Brandon Bennethum told the 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 deported again on Tuesday.
Judge Gallagher, in an order last year, forbade deportation of the migrants subject to the class-action settlement 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 woman, 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 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. Avalos-Lopez was held in immigration detention in Louisiana from the time his deportation was reversed until he was put on the new flight on Tuesday.
He had been scheduled for a video psychological evaluation that day, 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.
Eldhen Fajardo, the analyst who submitted USCIS’s explanation to the judge on Thursday, indicated that if Mr. Avalos-Lopez does come back, he could quickly be looking at a third deportation.
“My understanding is that, if ELA returns to the United States, USCIS’s policy will be to move forward with closing the case due to ELA’s failure to attend his biometrics appointments. USCIS would provide ELA with notice of that closure,” the analyst wrote.
Contact the author
Please read our comment policy before commenting.