A federal judge on Thursday ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be immediately released from immigration custody, marking the latest twist in the case that the judge wrote is “as well known as it is extraordinary.”
“Since Abrego Garcia’s return from wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been re-detained, again without lawful authority,” U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland wrote in her opinion explaining her order.
“As before, Abrego Garcia’s case demands judicial intervention to ensure that” government officials “choose constitutionally permissible means of implementing” immigration law, she wrote. “Because Abrego Garcia has been held in ICE detention to effectuate third-country removal absent a lawful removal order, his requested relief is proper,” she wrote.
The government illegally sent Abrego to El Salvador in March, then said it would never bring him back him to the U.S., and then returned him to the U.S. in June to face criminal charges for allegedly transporting undocumented immigrants illegally. Abrego has pleaded not guilty to the charges and argued they should be thrown out on the grounds that they’re unconstitutionally vindictive.
The government has simultaneously been trying to remove him from the country again, which has prompted litigation over which so-called third country he can be sent to. He had previously secured an order preventing his removal to his native country of El Salvador, which made it illegal to have sent him there in March. Xinis, an Obama appointee, had ordered his return after he filed a civil lawsuit in litigation that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which largely approved her order, though the government continued to resist his return until it finally got him back in June.
In her ruling Thursday, Xinis noted that Abrego and others who were sent to El Salvador’s notorious terror prison “were systematically beaten and tortured.”
She also wrote that the government had “affirmatively misled the tribunal” in claiming that the African nation of Liberia was the only viable removal option because Costa Rica wouldn’t take him. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there,” she wrote. The bottom line for her release order is that the government didn’t have a lawful order to remove him to a third country, so it can’t justify his continued detention. She wrote that while government officials “may eventually get it right, they have not as of today.” A government spokesperson responded to the ruling on social media, saying, “This is naked judicial activism by an Obama appointed judge. This order lacks any valid legal basis and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts.” Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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