A US appeals court will review the Trump administration’s decision not to return a 20-year-old Venezuelan asylum seeker who was deported to El Salvador earlier this year. He is currently in Salvadoran custody.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed last week to hear Trump’s appeal, extending until May 15 a lower court’s order requiring the Trump administration to immediately return him to US soil.
The appeals court ordered plaintiffs to submit their response by noon on Monday. The Trump administration will have until 9 a.m. Tuesday to respond.
Daniel Lozano-Camargo, a 20-year-old Venezuelan national previously referred to in court documents as “Cristian,” was deported to El Salvador in March as part of the Trump administration’s initial wave of Alien Enemies Act removals.
In April, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher, a Trump appointee, ruled that Lozano-Camargo’s deportation violated a 2024 agreement between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and a group of young asylum seekers who entered the U.S. as unaccompanied children.
Under that agreement, DHS agreed not to deport the migrants in question until their asylum claims could be fully heard in a US court. Gallagher ruled last month that Lozano-Camargo’s deportation was a “breach of contract,” as his asylum case had not yet been heard, and ordered the US government to facilitate his release.
Last week, she rejected a new filing from the Justice Department, which claimed Lozano-Camargo was eligible for removal based on his arrest and conviction for cocaine possession in Houston this year.
In earlier court documents, Justice Department officials claimed that Lozano-Camargo was a member of a “violent terrorist gang,” but they did not link him to Tren de Aragua. Some of their most recent court filings have been redacted.
Gallagher had specifically directed the Trump administration to make a “good faith request to the government of El Salvador” to “release Cristian, [or Lozano-Camargo], to U.S. custody for transport back to the United States to await the adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS,” which it had not done.
Gallagher emphasized in court last week that her decision is solely based on due process protections and has nothing to do with the strength of his asylum application.
“I don’t think that this is a case about whether or not Cristian is going to eventually get asylum,” she told lawyers for the Trump administration.
“Processing is important. We don’t skip to the end and say, ‘We all know how this is going to end, so we’ll just skip that part,'” she explained. “Whether he eventually receives asylum is not the point. The issue is, and has always been, one of procedure.”
Nonetheless, Gallagher agreed to stay her decision for 48 hours, giving the administration time to appeal to a higher court, which it did.
