A federal judge reaffirmed his earlier ruling mandating the return of a Guatemalan migrant to the United States due to the deportation lacking rightful procedure.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts rejected a motion from the Department of Justice to reconsider his previous order from Friday. This order called on President Donald Trump’s administration to “take all immediate steps to facilitate” bringing the migrant back to the U.S.
The migrant, referred to only as O.C.G., stated in a court declaration that he fled his homeland last year after facing persecution and torture. His initial attempt to seek asylum in the U.S. occurred in March of 2024, but he was swiftly deported to Guatemala. He made a second bid for asylum in the U.S. a month later.
As he made his way north, in Mexico he was held for ransom, raped and targeted for being gay, the migrant’s court declaration states. In May of 2024, a U.S. asylum officer determined O.C.G. “had a reasonable fear” to return to Guatemala and was taken into immigration custody to see his case through.
In February, an immigration judge determined O.C.G. would likely be persecuted if deported to his native Guatemala, and granted him a withholding of removal, court records show. Instead, he was placed on a bus to Mexico a few days later, without any notice.
Mexican authorities told O.C.G. he could apply for asylum in Mexico, but they told him he “would be kept locked up for the months it took to make a decision or I could just accept for them to take me back to Guatemala,” his declaration states. Afraid to request asylum in Mexico after what he experienced there, O.C.G. opted to return to Guatemala. “I had no safe options,” he said.
In another sealed declaration submitted to the court last week, O.C.G. reported “living in constant fear of his attackers” in Guatemala, “being unable to leave the place where he is staying, not being able to rely on the police to protect him, and not being able to see his mother for fear of exposing her to violence, among other hardships,” Murphy wrote in his order Friday.
“In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped,” Murphy wrote in his 14-page decision.
Friday’s order marks the third time courts have instructed the Trump administration to bring back deportees found to have been improperly or illegally deported.
Courts have already ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Daniel Lozano-Camargo, both of whom were deported in March to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador. The Trump administration has not yet facilitated their return to the U.S.
The U.S. Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. But on Saturday, the DOJ said in an X post that “the court’s orders in this case disrupt the president’s ability to faithfully execute our immigration laws.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland also weighed in on the case in another X post Saturday, saying, O.C.G. “was an illegally present alien who was granted withholding of removal to Guatemala. He was instead removed to Mexico, a safe third option for him, pending his asylum claim. Yet, this federal activist judge is ordering us to bring him back, so he can have an opportunity to prove why he should be granted asylum to a country that he has had no past connection to.”
Under U.S. and international laws, it is illegal to deport someone to a country where their life would be endangered.
In his order denying DOJ’s motion on Monday, Murphy wrote that administration officials “have mischaracterized this Court’s order, while at the same time manufacturing the very chaos they decry.”
The judge added that the Trump administration has repeatedly violated a preliminary injunction he put in place last month, requiring it provides written notices to both noncitizens and their counsel before any third-country deportations and gives them meaningful opportunities to raise fear-based claims.
The administration failed to do this as recent as last week when it raced to deport eight people from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba and Mexico to South Sudan, Murphy wrote.
Trina Realmuto of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, the organization providing legal representation to O.C.G. and three other plaintiffs in the same case, told NBC News in an email Tuesday: “As the court found, this problem is one of the government’s own making.”
Gary Grumbach contributed.
