It’s not just Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Another federal judge ordered the Trump administration to facilitate another person’s return from El Salvador.
The new ruling comes amid unusual activity on the Abrego Garcia docket. After lambasting the government’s failure to comply with court orders in that case, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis agreed Wednesday to halt the “discovery” information-gathering process for a week. The reasons for doing so were litigated in nonpublic sealed motions, so we don’t know why exactly.
We know, however, that the pause was agreed to by the judge and both parties, raising the question of whether the government is taking serious steps to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. after resisting doing so at all levels of the court system.
But whatever happens in Abrego Garcia’s case, he’s not the only person the government must return.
“Thus, like Judge Xinis in the Abrego Garcia matter, this Court will order [government] Defendants to facilitate Cristian’s return to the United States so that he can receive the process he was entitled to under the parties’ binding Settlement Agreement,” U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote.
The pseudonymous Cristian was part of a class action lawsuit from 2019 brought by people who came to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors and later sought asylum. They wanted their asylum applications decided while they remained in the U.S. There was a settlement in the case, but the government still sent Cristian to El Salvador last month before his asylum application was decided.
The government argued that Cristian was subject to President Donald Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation. Trump invoked the 18th century wartime law to summarily send alleged Venezuelan gang members not only out of the country but to a notorious Salvadoran prison, where the U.S. funds their detention. The ultimate legality of Trump’s invocation has not yet been determined in court, but it has prompted litigation in several cases, including possible contempt proceedings against Trump administration officials in a case that’s on appeal.
Declining to rule for the administration on public safety grounds, Gallagher wrote that the government “provided no evidence, or even any specific allegations, as to how Cristian, or any other Class Member, poses a threat to public safety.”
Noting that her ruling “puts this case squarely into the procedural morass that has been playing out very publicly,” Gallagher wrote that facilitating Cristian’s return “includes, but is not limited to, [government] Defendants making a good faith request to the government of El Salvador to release Cristian to U.S. custody for transport back to the United States to await the adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS,” referring to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The judge noted that “both parties agree that this is just a breach of contract case. It is not a habeas case, or a case assessing the propriety of the government’s recent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.” She wrote that “under the plain terms of the Settlement Agreement and fundamental tenets of contract law, removal from the United States of a Class Member, including but not limited to Cristian, without a final determination on the merits by USCIS on the Class Member’s pending asylum application violates the Settlement Agreement.” Gallagher was appointed to the bench by Trump after her nomination by President Barack Obama expired. Her nomination was supported by Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who recently visited Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, where he’s been detained without having been convicted of any crime. 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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