President Donald Trump addresses the media as he arrives for a meeting with the House Republican Conference at the Capitol on Tuesday, May 20, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr.).
Lawyers representing a man deported by the Trump administration in defiance of a court order are requesting the appointment of a special master to probe the “unlawful” deportation.
The government acknowledged deporting Jordin Melgar-Salmeron in early May, attributing it to “a confluence of administrative errors,” including a failure in communications, as previously reported by Law&Crime.
Now, the man’s attorneys are rejecting those explanations in a letter motion filed Monday with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
“The Government’s actions in this case constitute no less than a grave affront to the rule of law — both for its ultimate violation of this Court’s court order and the apparently administrative perfidy which lead to that result,” the motion reads. “Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s first priority is to have the Government correct its unlawful action by returning him to U.S. soil — and this Court should issue such an order.”
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The order of events in the case is important.
The underlying litigation dates back to late 2023, when Melgar-Salmeron filed a petition for review and a stay of removal. The government, for its part, filed a motion for the case to be held in abeyance, asking to pause all proceedings while other, similar cases made their way through the court system.
“On January 2, 2024, this Court granted the Government’s request to indefinitely delay proceedings,” the motion explains. “Presumably as a direct result of the abeyance order (which again, had been granted at the Government’s request), this Court took no further action in the case until 2025.”
Then, in April, the government changed its mind, informing the court it intended to deport Melgar-Salmeron sometime after May 8, unless “the Court has not issued an order granting a stay.”
On May 2, the man’s attorneys filed a letter asking to resuscitate the long-dormant stay motion. The Second Circuit issued the requested stay at 9:52 a.m. on May 7, instructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that deportation was off the table.
This court order, the latest motion points out, was issued “approximately 48 hours before the Government had represented it intended to remove Mr. Melgar-Salmeron.” The man’s attorneys suggest the government was not caught off guard by the ruling.
“As the Government’s papers and supporting declarations make clear, this stay order was (1) issued and (2) distributed to ICE — all while Mr. Melgar-Salmeron remained on U.S. soil, in the physical custody of ICE,” the motion reads. “But the Government deported him anyway.”
Despite the court’s order and the earlier timeline the Trump administration supplied to the judges, Melgar-Salmeron was deported to El Salvador “at some point in the morning of May 7, 2025,” U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorneys admitted in a filing on May 8.
The court, in response, had some questions.
As it turned out, Melgar-Salmeron was flown out of the country at 10:20 a.m. on the day in question — roughly 28 minutes after the appellate court enjoined his deportation in the stay order.
Then, more questions were posed by the judges.
On May 28, the government offered more answers.
Melgar-Salmeron was being held at the ICE office in Buffalo, New York, until he was transferred to Alexandria, Louisiana, on May 2, a DOJ attorney said. The responsibility for monitoring court updates allegedly remained with ICE Buffalo.
The assistant field director for the Buffalo ICE office admitted in an affidavit that “ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations] Buffalo did not directly communicate to ERO New Orleans” that ICE promised to halt his deportation until at least May 8.
Complicating matters, the ICE Buffalo officer responsible for Melgar-Salmeron’s case was not forwarded an email sent to other officers that pushed forward the deportation date, the DOJ said.
Finally, on the day of the deportation, Melgar-Salmeron was initially counted as “not present” among several people scheduled to be flown out of the country, according to the government. He was then labeled a “no-show” on the flight manifest. Later, however, the man was located and loaded onto the flight, but the manifest was never updated.
Melgar-Salmeron’s legal team rubbished those excuses, at length:
The Government says much in its papers about unfortunate “administrative oversights” — a benign term for misconduct which should shock the conscience of even the most minimally competent immigration official (ranging from specific issues like losing a detainee within an ICE facility, to structural ones, like maintaining a system where the ICE personnel placing individuals on deportation flights do not directly check whether ICE is legally prevented from those individuals, even where ICE has reason to expect an order any minute). But this obfuscates the Government’s flagrant misrepresentation of absolutely critical facts — both in its initial representations as to removal date and in its subsequent explanation to this Court — which this Court understandably (and reasonably) relied upon, to Mr. Melgar-Salmeron’s obvious detriment.
Key to the man’s latest motion are some dueling claims in declarations filed by the government, his attorneys insist.
In one declaration, an ICE official said Melgar-Salmeron was scheduled for a May 7 deportation on April 25. In another declaration, a different ICE official said he was scheduled for a May 9 deportation on April 25. And, the first ICE official said the May 7 deportation was the initial plan, until the flight manifest was changed. Meanwhile, the second ICE official said that the May 7 deportation was always the plan.
Melgar-Salmeron’s attorneys lambaste those diverging storylines as evidence that the government cannot be trusted, while suggesting their apparent incompatibility is beside the point.
Again, the letter motion, at length:
[E]ven if the Government’s contradictory statements are to be believed (and they should be afforded no presumption of accuracy in light of their inconsistencies and reliance upon information of unknown provenance and potentially multiple levels of hearsay), Mr. Melgar-Salmeron (1) was on the ground in ICE custody when the stay was issued at 9:52 a.m. (2) was on the ground in ICE custody when the stay was communicated to ICE and (3) remained in ICE custody — and had been in the air no more than 25 minutes — when ICE’s internal systems were updated to acknowledge the stay order.
To that end, the man’s attorneys say the government must “actively facilitate” his “immediate return” to the country.
“For the purposes of his return, whether that violation was ultimately caused by perfidy, administrative incompetence or simply the ‘banal horror’ of wrongful removal is irrelevant: the Government must undo its wrongful actions,” the motion goes on. “The Petitioner respectfully requests that this Court simply order the Government to fix its violation and return Mr. Melgar-Salmeron to the United States.”
But the motion is not content to rely on such relief alone.
“This case raises troubling questions as to whether the Government is able — or even willing — to honor the agreement it made with this Court, both before and after its violation of a court order,” the motion continues. “Further investigation is needed in aid of that question — and the information gleaned thus far shows why an independent fact-finder (who is not limited to accepting answers at face value) is critical in this endeavor.”
Conrad Hoyt contributed to this story.
