Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, suggests the 2019 deportation order of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran who was deported by the Trump administration last month, authorized by former U.S. Immigration Judge David M. Jones is widely to blame for the current confusion surrounding Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
On Tuesday, The Star obtained the final deportation order issued by the retired judge in 2019, which also granted “withholding of removal” relief, showing the judge appeared to prohibit immigration authorities from deporting Abrego Garcia to Guatemala, not to El Salvador.
Emphasizing how the judge inexplicably named Guatemala as the nation to which Abrego Garcia was not to be deported by the federal government, Pappert questioned whether the judge simply confused the two countries – Guatemala and El Salvador – or if there was some other specific reason for naming Guatemala.
“This judge…needs to get a map because he does not seem to know the difference between El Salvador and Guatemala, that’s one of the possibilities. Or, he actually meant to write Guatemala as he mentioned it four times throughout his order,” Pappert said on Wednesday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Pappert went on to point out, however, that while the deportation order mentions ‘El Salvador’ eight times throughout the 15-page document, the South American country is acknowledged largely in “biographical context,” which Pappert added further makes it difficult to determine the judge’s true intent regarding which country Abrego Garcia should not have been deported to.
“Now, I don’t want to make it seem as though this judge didn’t mention El Salvador at all because he did. He mentioned Guatemala four times. He mentioned El Salvador eight times, but interestingly, most of the mentions of El Salvador were things related to…mostly biographical or tangential information,” Pappert explained.
“Things like, what is a pupusa? It’s defined as an El Salvadoran stuffed tortilla. He was a citizen of El Salvador, born there, and he lived in this city,” Pappert added.
With regard to Abrego Garcia being deported to El Salvador last month under orders by the Trump administration, Pappert said he believes the deportation appears to be legally just according to the judges words printed on the 2019 deportation order.
“If you follow the black and white words on the page of this 2019 order, it says specifically, you cannot deport this guy to Guatemala,” Pappert said.
Further defending the Trump administration by suggesting it acted within due process if they followed the language of the 2019 order, Pappert argued that the sloppiness of the judge’s writing is more to blame than any administrative wrongdoing.
“Frankly, I think one of the big things here is how sloppy and poorly written and vague and confusing this order is written,” Pappert said.
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
