Gay Man Wrongfully Deported, Judge Orders U.S. to Bring Him Back

U.S. District Judge Brian E. Murphy is not here for the Trump administration’s antics. He has ordered the administration to facilitate the return of a Guatemalan asylum seeker who was illegally kicked out of the United States. The man — identified only by the initials O.C.G. in court filings — is gay and was explicitly barred from being sent back to his native Guatemala by an immigration judge’s withholding-of-removal order. Instead, ICE officials put him on a bus to Mexico and shipped him south anyway. Murphy ruled that this rushed removal “lacked any semblance of due process.”

Now, Murphy has layed down the law. The administration is being forced to return the man, despite pushback from conservatives.

O.C.G. was wrongfully deported after seeking asylum.

O.C.G.’s case arose from an attempt to escape persecution. O.C.G. fled Guatemala in 2024 after surviving multiple homophobic attacks in his hometown. When he reached the U.S. border, he applied for asylum. A U.S. immigration judge later granted him withholding of removal, a protection that should have barred any return to Guatemala. But two days after that order, immigration agents bundled him onto a bus headed to Mexico. In Mexico, he was given a false choice: remain imprisoned in a distant Mexican detention center while awaiting a fraught asylum process, or be sent back to Guatemala.

According to NPR, he chose Guatemala and has since been living in hiding there. Murphy ruled that this removal was baseless. “No one has ever suggested that O.C.G. poses any sort of security threat,” Murphy wrote. “In general, this case presents no special facts or legal circumstances, only the banal horror of a man being wrongfully loaded onto a bus and sent back to a country where he was allegedly just raped and kidnapped.”

U.S. officials later admitted they never gave him the mandatory credible fear screening before deporting him, a clear violation of asylum law. The deportation took place amid an aggressive new immigration crackdown. In recent weeks, Trump appointees at ICE have carried out mass courthouse arrests and charter flights to remove migrants as quickly as possible.

The Trump administration is pushing back.

The Trump administration is pushing back against Murphy’s ruling. In filings during the week of May 19, officials acknowledged that a key part of their story was false. They earlier claimed O.C.G. volunteered to go to Mexico, but now admit no ICE officer actually spoke to him about the danger. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin condemned Murphy’s order, calling him a “federal activist judge.”

McLaughlin suggested that O.C.G. had been in the country illegally and that his removal to Mexico was intended as a “safe third option,” pending his U.S. asylum claim. He further vowed that the administration would appeal. However, McLaughlin has not yet announced whether it will follow Murphy’s order.

Meanwhile, Murphy’s ruling adds to a string of recent court actions. In other cases, he has blocked flights sending migrants to South Sudan and barred quick removals when home countries refuse them. And the U.S. Supreme Court has already ordered the administration to undo one botched expulsion.

Will the Guatemalan asylum seeker return to U.S. soil? Only time will tell.

Do you think O.C.G. ever should’ve been deported after a judge explicitly ruled he’d face persecution back home?

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