6 hours ago
3
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
President Trump says he is powerless to retrieve a man who was deported because of an administrative error. But he has done so before.
- April 15, 2025Updated 5:08 p.m. ET
In August 2018, during President Trump’s first term, an Iraqi immigrant named Muneer Subaihani went missing.
A refugee who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, Mr. Subaihani was among hundreds of Iraqis who had been protected from deportation under a federal court order. His lawyers figured he was still in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he had been placed after he was swept up in an ICE raid.
A search of the federal ICE database turned up nothing, so the attorneys went to the Justice Department, looking for an answer. Within a day, they got one.
The government said it had made a mistake, according to Margo Schlanger, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School who was one of Mr. Subaihani’s lawyers. Mr. Subaihani had been deported to Iraq, in violation of the court order.
The case has striking similarities to one that is playing out now in Mr. Trump’s second term, after the United States deported a Salvadoran man because of what the government has acknowledged was an “administrative error.”
But the Trump administration’s response in the two cases could not be more different, a sign of how emboldened Mr. Trump has become in his defiance of the courts and in his determination to take a hard line on deportations, regardless of legal constraints.
