The Justice Department is moving to drop charges against a man it accused of being an MS-13 leader, prompting fears from his attorney that the administration might deport him to a prison in El Salvador.
Attorney General Pam Bondi held a press conference last month to announce the arrest of Henrry Villatoro Santos, referring to the 24-year-old Salvadoran national as “one of the top leaders of MS-13.”
But on Wednesday the Justice Department moved to dismiss the charges, prompting the unusual push from Villatoro Santos’s lawyer seeking to delay the dropping of any charges against his client.
Villatoro Santos’s lawyer noted that the Trump administration plans to “immediately” place him in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody.
“The danger of Mr. Villatoro Santos being unlawfully deported by ICE without due process and removed to El Salvador, where he would almost certainly be immediately detained at one of the worst prisons in the world without any right to contest his removal, is substantial, both in light of the Government’s recent actions and the very public pronouncements in this particular case,” the lawyer, Muhammad Elsayed, wrote.
Elsayed noted a related case challenging the Trump administration’s deportation of another Salvadoran man who was protected from removal in 2019 but was nonetheless mistakenly deported to prison in El Salvador due to what the Justice Department called an “administrative error.”
“The examples of the Government depriving immigrants of basic due process have, unfortunately, become plentiful,” he wrote, noting that in another case where Venezuelans challenged the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport them to the same prison, the government removed migrants and then argued it had “no jurisdiction once the petitioners were no longer on U.S. soil.”
“The undersigned is keenly aware of the unusual nature of this motion,” Elsayed wrote of his motion arguing to keep the charges against his client. “But these are unusual times.”
