UPDATE (April 7, 2025, 4:02 p.m. ET): Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday halted a lower court order that would’ve required the Trump administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States from El Salvador by midnight. Litigation will continue in the case, with further possible rulings to come in the future from Roberts or the full court in the matter.
The Trump administration once again turns to the Supreme Court for emergency relief. This time, it’s ahead of a midnight deadline to return a man to the U.S. who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.
The federal government admits what it called an “administrative error” in sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. But it told the high court Monday that having done so “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.”
The federal government admits what it called an “administrative error” in sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
The district court in this case is a Maryland federal judge, Obama appointee Paula Xinis, who issued the order and deadline that the administration wants the justices to upend. In the pending high court application, the recently confirmed solicitor general, John Sauer, called her action “unprecedented” in “dictating to the United States that it must not only negotiate with a foreign country to return an enemy alien on foreign soil, but also succeed by 11:59 p.m. tonight.”
The president nominated Sauer to the prestigious post — representing the federal government at the Supreme Court — after the lawyer represented Donald Trump in the appeal in which a divided high court granted Trump broad criminal immunity last year as he ran for office again.
The administration failed to get a Richmond, Virginia-based federal appeals court to halt Xinis’ order. In separate opinions explaining their views Monday, judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote 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”; that the government’s contrary arguments are “unconscionable”; and that there’s “no question that the government screwed up here.”
Justifying her order in an opinion over the weekend, Xinis wrote that the government acknowledged it “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.” As to the government’s claim that he’s an MS-13 gang member, she wrote: “The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, 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.” Monday’s application is one of several emergency motions pending before the justices in which the administration wants relief from adverse rulings from lower courts. In resolving one of those motions on Friday, related to the canceling of education-related grants, the court sided with the administration in a contentious 5-4 decision. 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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