Jun 17
2025
Feds won’t retrieve wrongfully deported migrant
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Jordin Melgar-Salmeron. Photo submitted.
Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, the Salvadoran man long detained in Batavia and deported to his home country last month in violation of a federal court order, is allowed to return to the United States.
But only if he can get to the border himself.
That’s the position the Trump administration has taken in the case, according to recent court filings reviewed by Investigative Post.
Melgar-Salmeron’s attorneys are demanding the government actively facilitate his return, as it did for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, another Salvadoran man deported in violation of a court order whose case has gained wide attention. Following Investigative Post’s reporting on Melgar-Salmeron May 30, Politico, The New York Times and other outlets also publicized the case.
The Trump administration countered the demand that it return Melgar-Salmeron, arguing that it merely had to allow him into the country, not actively bring him back. The Department of Homeland Security, administration lawyer Kitty Lees wrote in a June 9 filing, will only “enable [Melgar-Salmeron’s] return to the United States by agreeing to parole him into the United States should he present himself at a U.S. port of entry.”
The government is not required to do anything to facilitate that return to the border, Lees wrote.
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That would make Melgar-Salmeron’s return nearly impossible, attorney Matthew Borowski told Investigative Post, as he’s currently incarcerated in a notorious Salvadoran prison.
“There’s no way for him to get to the border. He’s locked in a torture prison in El Salvador because the U.S. government rendered him there in violation of a court order,” Borowski said in an interview. “So their proposal is offensive, honestly.”
The court filings further describe the role the Buffalo office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement played in the wrongful deportation. In her June 9 letter, Lees pinned responsibility on the local office. The Buffalo ICE office, she wrote:
- “Had administrative responsibility,” for Melgar-Salmeron;
- “Overlooked the various emails and manifests scheduling [him] for the May 7, 2025 flight.” And;
- “Did not successfully communicate with [ICE] New Orleans regarding the … stay of removal prior to [Melgar-Salmeron’s] removal, despite attempts to do so through notes in ICE’s internal electronic removal system.”
All of this, she wrote, added up to a series of “sequential, coincidental errors.”
“These facts demonstrate that a perfect storm of errors occurred to allow for [Melgar-Salmeron’s] untimely, and inadvertent, removal, despite the Government’s assurances and the eventual stay order,” Lees wrote.
Elsewhere, however, the Department of Homeland Security has said Melgar-Salmeron’s deportation was no accident, contradicting what Lees, of the Justice department, has argued in court.
“There was no ‘error’ in the deportation of this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
A Homeland Security spokesperson first issued that statement to Politico May 30, before the latest court filings, and reiterated it to Investigative Post Monday. A spokesperson did not respond to a question from Investigative Post about the contradictory statements.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomError or not, Melgar-Salmeron’s attorneys have now latched onto the conflicting positions as evidence the judges should appoint a fact finder in the case to determine how the deportation occurred and whether or not the government has been truthful.
His attorneys have also asked the judges to order the Trump administration to return their client to the United States, not just allow him back in should he appear at the border. His doing so would be nearly impossible anyway, they argue, given his incarceration. Homeland Security and ICE, attorney Daniel Jackson argued in a Friday night letter to the court, must “right its wrong: it must actively return Mr. Melgar-Salmeron to the United States — to get him back, not just let him back.”
“Unless ordered otherwise, the Government apparently intends to do no more than passively allow Mr. Melgar-Salmeron back into the Country,” Jackson wrote. “The Government’s proposal in this regard is shocking.”
The Trump administration has countered that a special fact finder is not necessary as it’s been forthcoming with the court about the deportation. Lees, the administration’s lawyer, did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Meanwhile, neither Borowski nor Melgar-Salmeron’s wife have been able to communicate with him since his deportation. His wife said he’s yet to be charged with any crimes in El Salvador.
“Detainees like my husband have no rights to anything even though they’re not being prosecuted,” Melgar-Salmeron’s wife told Investigative Post. “The officers in these prisons mistreat them and torture them. This hurts me because I don’t know how he’s doing and there’s no way to communicate with him.”
How the deportation happened
Until Trump took office in January, Melgar-Salmeron’s deportation case had long been on pause. He was released from federal prison in 2023 and had been detained in the ICE detention center in Batavia since.
In April, the administration sought to expedite his deportation and said it would give the Second Circuit Court of Appeals until May 8 to decide if Melgar-Salmeron could stay in the United States while the case proceeded. Otherwise, it would schedule his deportation for May 9.
The morning of May 7, the judges complied with the Trump administration’s request and issued an order allowing Melgar-Salmeron to remain in ICE custody. Twenty-eight minutes later, however, ICE put him on a plane to El Salvador. He was then taken into Salvadoran custody and booked into the Izalco prison, notorious for conditions amounting to human rights abuses.
The judges have since demanded answers from the Trump administration as to why ICE violated their order. The Trump administration has argued the deportation was a mistake, calling it a “confluence of administrative errors” in one filing.
In the June 9 letter to the court, Lees offered for a second time an explanation as to why Melgar-Salmeron was deported after the court ordered him to remain in the United States.
According to an affidavit filed by Jamison Matuszewski, the executive deputy assistant director for ICE Air Operations, Melgar-Salmeron was originally supposed to be deported May 9. But ICE Air later combined that planned flight with one that left May 7 for “operational efficiency,” Matuszewski testified.
When that flight was moved up, however, it was ICE Buffalo that should have caught the change, Lees wrote.
In a previous affidavit to the court, Peter Sukmanowski, ICE’s assistant field office director for the Buffalo region, said ICE New Orleans informed his office on May 6 that Melgar-Salmeron was scheduled for deportation the following day. However, he testified, the deportation officer never got the email.
Lees characterized the government’s actions as a series of errors.
But Borowski pointed to McLaughlin’s statement that the deportation was, in fact, not an error at all.
“Which one is it? Is it a confluence of administrative errors, or is it not an error?” he questioned.
“Let’s put it this way: I came into immigration law already with very little faith in the U.S. government’s truthfulness in general. And this has done nothing to change my opinion of that.”
Melgar-Salmeron and family in limbo
According to McLaughlin’s statement, the Trump administration believes Melgar-Salmeron to be a violent gang member who’s broken U.S. laws on multiple occasions and would do so again if allowed to return.
His attorney, wife and even the federal prosecutors who locked him up in 2021 all paint a much different picture.
To them, Melgar-Salmeron is a man born into poverty in El Salvador and traumatized at a young age when he saw his stepfather attempt to kill his mother. He spent time in the United States as a child and eventually served time in a juvenile detention center, though it’s not clear on what charges. McLaughlin’s statement references only “gang activity.” Upon his release and deportation to El Salvador in 2012, he joined the MS-13 gang for protection from his still-violent stepfather, according to Borowski.
Borowski described his involvement with the gang as involuntary, and said that once he returned to the United States he was punished with a severe beating for leaving the gang. Although he was undocumented at that point, he turned his life around, started a family and found gainful employment as a roofer, Borowski said.
The prosecutors who sent him to prison on a gun charge — they said he found a sawed-off shotgun and decided to keep it — agreed.
“Against the odds, [Melgar-Salmeron] has demonstrated over the last decade that he did not let his tortured past determine his future,” the prosecutors wrote in their sentencing memo. “He is a family man, a devoted father to his four children, a husband, and a provider who was gainfully employed until his instant arrest.”
Now Melgar-Salmeron’s wife is the sole provider for their four children, aged four to 11. Father’s Day was tough, she told Investigative Post, because the kids wanted to talk to their dad but couldn’t. There’s no communicating with Salvadoran prisoners, she said.
“The 4-year-old girl was crying last night because she wanted to talk to him, she said. “I have to tell her that she’ll be able to talk to her dad soon because she doesn’t understand what’s happening.”
