Homeland Security removes the same protected asylum seeker to El Salvador a second time
The Department of Homeland Security flew a 19-year-old asylum seeker to El Salvador for the second time this year, which his attorneys told a federal court violated multiple court orders protecting class members.
What happened
The man, identified in court records only as E.L.A., had been removed to El Salvador in March; his attorneys confirmed he was a class member, the government agreed to bring him back, and he was returned to a Louisiana detention center on 7 August. He was in that Louisiana facility expecting the second day of a psychological evaluation in preparation for his asylum proceedings, and his attorneys learned only after the evaluation was cancelled that he had been flown out of the country again — a removal their filing states violated multiple court orders protecting class members. Government attorneys confirmed in a separate filing that E.L.A. was on a manifest for a flight that landed the afternoon of 1 September, and the Justice Department's filing says the defendants, which include DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are "considering appropriate steps to rectify the communication errors that led to ELA's erroneous removal." The settlement agreement was entered in 2024; Judge Stephanie Gallagher of the District of Maryland had previously found that the government violated it by deporting at least one class member with a pending asylum application, and in July found the government in contempt of her orders and directed it to put a system in place to flag potential class members and potential wrongful deportations.
Why it matters
This sub-indicator tracks whether court orders bind the executive in practice rather than on paper. A second removal of the same protected person — after the government had already brought him back once — is evidence about compliance itself rather than about any one case, and the assurance that a wrongful removal can be undone rests entirely on the government undoing it.