House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that the Supreme Court should hold members of the Trump administration in contempt of court if they don’t move to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported last month to El Salvador. 

The Supreme Court ruled last week that the United States is bound to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant living in Maryland with his family before the administration deported him to a notorious prison in his native country. The administration acknowledged in court that Abrego Garcia was wrongly targeted, and the move was an “administrative error.”

Still, top Trump administration officials have said they lack the authority to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. while doubling down on their contention that Abrego Garcia is dangerous.

That defiance, Jeffries said, should be met with an aggressive rebuke from the Supreme Court. 

“The Supreme Court has made clear that Mr. Abrego Garcia should not have been deported. In fact, the Trump administration has acknowledged that fact,” Jeffries told reporters Tuesday during a press briefing in his Brooklyn district. 

“And so they need to comply with the Supreme Court's directive, or the Supreme Court needs to enforce its order aggressively — which should include contempt.” 

The strange saga of Abrego Garcia has become a test case of the limits of President Trump’s aggressive mass-deportation campaign, which administration officials say is targeting gang members and other criminals living in the U.S. without legal status. 

Abrego Garcia had a measure of legal protection in the U.S. After an arrest in 2019, a judge blocked his deportation, ruling that a return to El Salvador, where he said he’d been a target of violent gangs, might pose a threat to his safety. 

Still, the Trump administration says Abrego Garcia is himself a member of the violent MS-13 gang — an allegation he denies — and they deported him last month to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), a maximum security prison in El Salvador where the administration, citing a 1798 law, has sent hundreds of deportees. 

In its ruling last week, the Supreme Court sided with Abrego Garcia on the substance of the case.

"The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal,” the court wrote. 

Yet the Supreme Court’s decision was not clear-cut. While it sided with a lower court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, it also raised questions about whether U.S. courts have the power to order that return. 

"The order properly requires the Government to 'facilitate' Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court found. “The intended  scope of the term 'effectuate' in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority.” 

Top administration officials say only Trump has the power to dictate U.S. foreign policy. And Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president, clouded the debate further this week in arguing that the deportation was not made in error, as the administration had previously stated, and that no one in Washington has the power to tell the Salvadoran government how to manage its own citizens. 

“No version of this, legally, ends up with him ever living here,” Miller said. 

In a meeting with Trump on Monday, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele backed the administration’s position, saying he also has no power to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. against Trump’s wishes. 

“Of course, I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said in the Oval Office with Trump by his side. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?”

The ongoing saga has made Abrego Garcia a cause celebre among human rights advocates and Democrats on Capitol Hill, where Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) has requested a meeting with Bukele during his visit to Washington. Jeffries, for one, said the Salvadoran president should agree to that conversation. 

"The president should accept that meeting request, and have a real discussion as to when Mr. Abrego Garcia is going to be returned to his family in the United States of America,” Jeffries said.