A federal judge ruled Friday that officials must return a Maryland dad to the U.S. after “embarrassed” Department of Justice attorneys admitted he was illegally deported.
The ruling means the Trump administration, which has claimed without evidence that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang leader, must fly the sheet metal apprentice back from El Salvador by midnight Monday or risk contempt charges.
It sets up a constitutional clash if the Trump administration does not comply—adding to the existing tension between the judiciary and the executive branch.
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U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, a Barack Obama appointee, ordered the return of Abrego Garcia after government attorneys admitted in court they could not defend the actions of immigration officials.
“This was an illegal act,” Xinis told a government lawyer, reported a Politico reporter at the hearing. “Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.”
Xinis said she was given no evidence to back up claims Abrego Garcia was a gang member, let alone a gang leader. Any claims without proof, she added, were “just chatter.”
“In a court of law, when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in the form of an indictment, a complaint, a criminal proceeding that has a robust process so we can assess the facts,” she said.
Erez Reuveni, a DOJ attorney, appeared “exasperated” with his side’s lack of defense to justify Abrego Garcia’s deportation to a foreign prison, Politico reported.
“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” he reportedly told Xinis. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”
Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father to a disabled daughter, was on one of the three flights full of alleged gang members—a handful of people given that designation because they had seemingly innocent tattoos—that flew to El Salvador on March 15. Those planes touched down in Central America despite a federal judge ruling mid-flight that the deportations, which the Trump administration justified under the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, were to be barred.
While loved ones of many flown to the notoriously hellish facility—known as CECOT, the world’s largest prison—have claimed they were wrongly taken there without due process, Abrego Garcia’s case appeared particularly egregious.
Government attorneys admitted this week that Abrego Garcia was flown to El Salvador—just days after he was pulled over and taken into custody in Maryland, where he lives with his American wife and child—because of an “administrative error.”
It later emerged that a U.S. judge ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia should never be deported to El Salvador because he faced the risk of persecution there.
Court documents from 2019 laid out that Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. at 16 because a rival gang of MS-13—the very one he is now accused of being part of—had been extorting and threatening his family over their pupusa business in San Salvador.
Abrego Garcia claimed the gang pressured him to join them but he refused, so he came to America to avoid potentially violent repercussions. He filed for asylum in 2019, but was denied because officials said his application was submitted too late.
Government attorneys argued this week that U.S. courts do not have the power to order Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. because he is technically in the custody of El Salvador. Xinis said Friday that if the U.S. is paying El Salvador millions to hold prisoners, U.S. courts hold the power to order the return of certain individuals.
