Chief Justice John Roberts agreed to pause a midnight Monday deadline for the Trump administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, of Maryland, to the U.S. after he was mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. News4’s Paul Wagner reports.
Chief Justice John Roberts agreed Monday to pause a midnight deadline for the Trump administration to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
The temporary order comes hours after a Justice Department emergency appeal to the Supreme Court arguing U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis overstepped her authority when she ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the United States.
The court asked Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to respond by Tuesday at 5 p.m.
On Friday, Xinis gave the administration until just before midnight Monday to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
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“The district court’s injunction — which requires Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of a foreign sovereign and return to the United States by midnight on Monday — is patently unlawful,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court papers, casting the order as one in “a deluge of unlawful injunctions” judges have issued to slow President Donald Trump's agenda.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sided with Kilmar and denied the government’s request for a stay. Pending what the Supreme Court decides, the order to return him to the U.S. by just before midnight Monday still stands.
“The United States 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 ruling by the three-judge panel says. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”
Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said the government has the power to bring his client back home.
“I don’t think there is anyone in this country who genuinely believes that if we didn’t just pick up the phone and make a good faith phone call, that we couldn’t get him back within a day or two,” he said on MSNBC on Monday afternoon. “I mean, the connections between our government and the government of El Salvador when it comes to these deportations, to this prison – they put Kristi Noem inside the walls of the prison and they got her back out. They can get him back out”.
The administration has conceded that Abrego Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador because an immigration judge found he likely would face persecution by local gangs. But he is no longer in U.S. custody and the government has no way to get him back, the administration argued.
The Trump administration is separately asking the Supreme Court to allow Trump to resume deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to the same Salvadoran prison under an 18th century wartime law.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, denied the administration's request for a stay. “There is no question that the government screwed up here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a brief opinion accompanying the unanimous denial.
The White House has described Abrego Garcia’s deportation as an “administrative error” but has also cast him an MS-13 gang member. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia said there is no evidence he was in MS-13.
Xinis wrote that the decision to arrest him and send him to El Salvador appears to be “wholly lawless,” explaining that little to no evidence supports a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Abrego Garcia was once an MS-13 member.
Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national who has never been charged or convicted of any crime, was detained by immigration agents and deported last month.
He had a permit from DHS to legally work in the U.S. and was a sheet metal apprentice pursuing a journeyman license, his attorney said. His wife is a U.S. citizen.
In 2019, an immigration judge barred the U.S. from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
A Justice Department lawyer conceded in a court hearing that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported. Attorney General Pam Bondi later removed the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, from the case and placed him on leave.
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