The Trump administration deported a 31-year-old Salvadoran man minutes after a federal appeals court barred his removal while his case proceeded, the government admitted in a court filing this past week.

In its filing, the government denied that it had violated the order from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, instead blaming “a confluence of administrative errors.” The filing argues that because the process of deporting the man, Jordin Melgar-Salmeron, had already started before the court issued its formal order, at 9:52 a.m. May 7, that meant the order had not been violated.

The plane carrying Melgar-Salmeron to El Salvador did not take off from Alexandria, Louisiana, until 10:20 a.m. Eastern time, according to the government’s timeline. The government had previously given the court what the judges called “express assurance” that it would not schedule a deportation for him until the next day. The deportation deepened the questions surrounding the Trump administration’s legal tactics and administrative errors as it has sought to carry out the president’s aggressive vision of deporting as many as 1 million immigrants during his first year in office. In at least three other deportation cases, federal judges have determined that Trump officials expelled people from the country in violation of standing court orders.

In an interview, one of Melgar-Salmeron’s lawyers disputed the government’s characterization of the deportation as a mistake, saying it appeared to be part of a larger pattern of the administration ignoring court orders.

“It would be an absurd level of mistake,” said Matthew Borowski, the lawyer, comparing it to a chef pouring in pepper instead of salt. “Verifying the paperwork and putting the right people on the plane is their job.”

The questions raised by the court over the deportation were reported earlier by Investigative Post, a nonprofit news outlet in western New York state.

In a filing Wednesday in response to questions from the three-judge appellate panel, the government detailed a series of communication lapses between an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Buffalo, New York, which was responsible for monitoring Melgar-Salmeron’s legal case, and one in Louisiana, where he was being held.

Administration lawyers emailed the Buffalo office at 10:08 a.m. May 7, but the office did not flag the court’s order in ICE’s internal system until 10:45 a.m., after the flight had taken off, an ICE official told the court.

Melgar-Salmeron, who had been affiliated with the MS-13 street gang and had previously served two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun, was appealing an order for his removal, fearing he could be sent to prison in El Salvador and persecuted there, his lawyer said. He had disavowed MS-13 and now has a wife and four children in Virginia, Borowski said. He said his client’s family believes Melgar-Salmeron is being held in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.