Earlier on Thursday, Karen Tumlin, one of the attorneys for Juan Manuel Montes, the 23-year-old DACA recipient who was deported to Mexico this past February and is now suing the Trump administration, participated on a press call with United We Dream’s Greisa Martínez Rosas and John-Michael Torres of La Unión Del Pueblo Entero (LUPE). Throughout the call, Tumlin said that her client is trying to seek the truth as to why he was sent back to Mexico, and also indicated that the government has yet to offer any clear evidence as to Montes’ detention and subsequent deportation. The Montes case has received a lot of national press in the past few days, and many national outlets like NBC News, ABC News and CNN asked questions during the press call.

“After an initial denial, DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] also now admits: our client was right about one thing,” said Tumlin, who is legal director of the National Immigration Law Center. “Juan’s DACA was valid until 2018. We’re committed to working to discover the truth about what happened between CBP [Customs and Border Enforcement] and our client that led him to being physically deported from this country. What we’ve seen here is a part of a disturbing pattern and practice of a failure to tell the whole truth on the part of DHS.”

Latino USA asked two questions during the call: whether Tumlin agreed with Martínez Rosas’ claim that Border Patrol was lying about why it arrested Montes and also why cases such as Montes’ are getting so much national attention in recent months.

Featured image of Juan Manuel Montes, courtesy of Juan Gastelum/National Immigration Law Center