‘In What Court Was He Convicted?’ Karoline Leavitt Dodges On Key Question About Migrant Mistakenly Imprisoned In El Salvador

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt dodged a key question Tuesday about a deported and imprisoned migrant, who the administration continues to claim is a gang member.

In a recent court filing, President Donald Trump’s administration admitted that a Maryland man named Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported and imprisoned indefinitely in El Salvador. Garcia, a Salvadoran national, was granted protected status in 2019 — meaning the U.S. government could not send him back to his home country for fear of retribution. The mistake was characterized as an “administrative error.”

Trump officials remain adamant that Garcia is a member of the infamous gang MS-13. Prior to being granted protected status, he was arrested earlier in 2019 while loitering in front of a Home Depot in Maryland. Due to his clothing — and allegations from an informant — police determined that he was indeed in the gang. His attorney, however, claimed the police haven’t provided evidence to support that claim.

It is important to note that he has not been convicted or tried in a court for his alleged ties to the gang.

Despite this fact, Leavitt insisted during her briefing that Garcia was indeed a leader of the gang and that she had seen the evidence. Asked by CBS News’s Nancy Cordes to provide evidence to support that claim, Leavitt simply repeated the administration’s position before listing various crimes committed by the gang.

CORDES: You said you’d seen evidence that this man was a convicted gang member. In what court was he convicted and for what?

LEAVITT: This individual was an MS-13 ringleader. This individual was also engaged in human trafficking. And I’m glad you brought up this point again because I would like to point out that if you just saw the headline from the insane, failing Atlantic magazine this morning, you would think this individual was father of the year living in Maryland, living a peaceful life, when that couldn’t be further from the truth. They didn’t even mention in the title of that article, or even in the first paragraph, that this individual is an illegal criminal who broke our nation’s immigration laws. He is a leader in the brutal MS-13 gang and he is involved in human trafficking; and now MS-13 is a designated foreign terrorist organization. Foreign terrorists have no legal protections in the United States of America, and this administration is going to continue to deport foreign terrorists and illegal criminals from our nation’s interior.

CORDES: But a judge ordered that he should remain in this country. So are you saying that it is OK to ignore a judge’s ruling if you don’t like it?

LEAVITT: Who does that judge work for?

CORDES: He’s an immigration judge.

LEAVITT: It was an immigration judge who works for the Department of Justice at the direction of the Attorney General of the United States, whose name is Pam Bondi, who has committed to eradicating MS-13 from our nation’s interior.

And let me tell you why we’ve made this commitment. MS-13, may I remind each and every one of you, is a brutal and vicious gang. They raped and strangled a 20-year-old autistic woman to death in Maryland. They hacked four people to death with machetes in a park on Long Island. They have kidnapped, sexually tortured, and shot a teenage girl in Texas after she insulted them — allegedly — killed and mutilated a 17-year-old girl in Virginia — stabbing him 16 times and cutting off his hands. They beheaded and cut out the heart of a man in Washington, D.C. They raped and murdered a 13-year-old girl in California. They sex trafficked a slew of young girls, including one who was just 12 years old; raped an 11-year-old girl in Brooklyn while her brother was in the room; sex trafficked a 13-year-old in Maryland and Virginia — miles away from this White House — even beating her 26 times on her backside with a baseball bat; pressured homeless New Yorkers to undergo unnecessary surgeries, such as spinal fusion, in order to bolster their fraudulent lawsuits.

These are vicious criminals. This is a vicious gang, and I wish that the media would spend just a second of the same time you have spent trying to litigate each and every individual of this gang who has been deported from our country as the innocent Americans whose lives have been lost at the hands of these brutal criminals. We maintain our position and very strongly so.

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