The Supreme Court is temporarily blocking a judge’s order that called on Donald Trump to bring back an illegally deported Maryland father who was sent to El Salvador’s notorious prison.
After Trump appealed to the nation’s highest court hours before a midnight deadline to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a single-page order that pauses the lower court’s order indefinitely as a legal battle over his detention plays out.
On April 4, a federal judge ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia after government attorneys admitted he was wrongfully deported due to an “administrative error” then argued that the case was no longer in their hands. Last week’s decision from Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to bring him back by midnight Monday.
“This is just a temporary administrative stay, we have full confidence that the Supreme Court will resolve this matter as quickly as possible,” Abrego Garcia’s attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told The Independent.
The administration’s request to the nation’s highest court follows a scorching appeals court ruling asserting that the government “has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process.”
“The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable,” appellate judges wrote Monday.
Abrego Garcia was sent to the mega prison in his home country on March 15, joining dozens of mostly Venezuelan immigrants on removal flights after the president secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members.
One of those planes allegedly carried immigrants with court orders for their removal, not under the president’s wartime authority. Abrego Garcia was on that plane — something administration officials have called an “oversight” — despite no orders for his removal from the country.
In 2019, a judge had blocked Abrego Garcia’s removal after credible testimony that he fears violence and death in El Salvador, which he fled in 2011. Under that order, he is allowed to remain in the United States legally, and must attend regular check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. His most recent appearance was in January, according to court documents.
He has no criminal record in either the United States or El Salvador, according to his attorney. He has been living in Maryland with his wife and 5-year-old child — both U.S. citizens — and helping raise two children from a previous relationship.
In a 22-page ruling on Sunday, Judge Xinis ripped the Trump administration for its “wholly lawless” decision and “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience.”
“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” Judge Xinis wrote.
The judge also questioned the administration’s insistence that Abrego Garcia is a member of transnational street gang MS-13, which appears to be based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
In its filing to the Supreme Court, the administration repeated allegations that Abrego Garcia is a member of a “foreign terrorist organization.”
“But, while the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error, … that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the Executive Branch as a subordinate diplomat, and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight,” solicitor general D. John Sauer wrote.
“The United States cannot guarantee success in sensitive international negotiations in advance, least of all when a court imposes an absurdly compressed, mandatory deadline that vastly complicates the give-and-take of foreign-relations negotiations,” he added. “The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador, nor can it compel El Salvador to follow a federal judge’s bidding.”
In response, lawyers for Abrego Garcia said he “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
“The Executive branch may not seize individuals from the streets, deposit them in foreign prisons in violation of court orders, and then invoke the separation of powers to insulate its unlawful actions from judicial scrutiny,” they wrote.
