The New Yorker:

Even as the Administration refuses to reveal the names of those it has deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a network of lawyers and advocates is fighting to keep their cases alive.

By Jonathan Blitzer

Pedro Escobar Blanco, one of two hundred and thirty-eightVenezuelans deported by the Trump Administration to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador on March 15th, never met the lawyer who is representing him in U.S. immigration court. They haven’t spoken by phone or texted or communicated through an intermediary. He almost certainly isn’t aware that he’s being represented at all. Yet, a month after he entered Salvadoran custody, an immigration judge in Southern California held a hearing on his asylum case. Escobar Blanco wasn’t in attendance—no one has seen or heard from him since he was sent to El Salvador—and the judge, citing his absence, ordered him removed from the country.

Judges regularly issue deportation orders in absentia for people who are on what’s called the non-detained docket. These individuals have already been released from detention on the condition that they later appear in immigration court. However, if a person is in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as Escobar Blanco had been since October, 2024, he cannot possibly show up for a court date unless the government lets him. The judge’s logic—penalizing him for not being there—made little sense. It also meant that he would be barred from entering the U.S. for the next ten years. “I objected,” Andreana Sarkis, Escobar Blanco’s lawyer, said in a subsequent declaration. “His ‘failure to appear’ was through no fault of his own, but rather through ice’s failure to produce him.”

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