Trump turns to Supreme Court on wrongly deported Salvadoran

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block an order to bring back a Maryland man who immigration officials conceded was wrongly deported to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador.

The administration filed its request Monday just as a federal appeals court unanimously declined to block U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s order, which gives the United States until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

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,” Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote for two of the three judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “The government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

The decision is the latest hurdle for President Donald Trump as he pursues his deportation policy. It comes amid another tense courtroom standoff, with a federal judge in Washington saying the U.S. may have knowingly defied his oral order to halt deportations of Venezuelans it says are gang members. Like Abrego Garcia, they were sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. The Supreme Court is also weighing the administration’s request to resume deportations of alleged Venezuelan gang members under a wartime law.

The Justice Department says it no longer has any legal authority over Abrego Garcia.

“The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador, nor can it compel El Salvador to follow a federal judge’s bidding,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court.

Sauer’s application went to Chief Justice John Roberts, who handles emergency requests involving the 4th Circuit. Roberts can act on his own, possibly with an interim order, or refer the matter to the full nine-member court.

U.S. ‘Screwed Up’

In the Abrego Garcia case, Circuit Judge James Harvie Wilkinson III issued a concurring opinion saying the government “screwed up here” and has has made no attempt to rectify it.

“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” Wilkinson wrote. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”

Thacker agreed the government “must clean up the mess it has made.”

But Wilkinson also said the case raises tensions between the executive branch improperly deporting a resident and a judge effectively ordering another nation to release one of its own citizens from its own prison. He suggested that the executive and judicial branches might work in a way that’s “more collaborative than combative.”

He said that “in this most fraught and polarized of times,” that “remains the only way that our system of constitutional governance can ever hope to work.”

The case involving the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, was spurred by the government’s March 15 deportation of more than 200 migrants on three planes — including two carrying alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua that Trump had declared “alien enemies.” Abrego Garcia was on a third plane of migrants the US said were deported under other immigration laws.

The U.S. first tried to deport Abrego Garcia in 2019, when a confidential informant said he was an active member of the MS-13 gang, the government said. An immigration judge initially denied him bail, ruling he was a danger to the community. The judge later said he could be deported, but not to El Salvador, because his life would be threatened.

Bulls Hat and Hoodie

He was released and was living in Maryland with his wife and young child, both U.S. citizens, when he was arrested March 12 by immigration officials “due to his prominent role in MS-13,” the U.S. said. Despite the earlier bar on his removal to El Salvador, he was sent there anyway through an “administrative error,” the government conceded.

In an opinion Sunday, Xinis criticized Abrego Garcia’s detention, which she said “appears wholly lawless.” U.S. officials 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,” the judge wrote.

Xinis said the U.S. produced “no evidence” that he was connected to the MS-13 gang or any other criminal organization.

“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,” she wrote Sunday.

Internal Strife

The case has created strife within the Justice Department. At the April 4 hearing before Xinis, she questioned Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni about what legal authority was used to arrest Abrego Garcia in March.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answers for you on a lot of these questions,” Reuveni said. He said he could only point to “the removal order from 2019 that cannot be executed as to El Salvador.” He said: “We concede he should not have been removed to El Salvador.”

The judge asked why the U.S. can’t get Abrego Garcia back.

“When this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question,” Reuveni said. “I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory.”

Xinis said she appreciated Reuveni’s candor. The next day, the lawyer was put on indefinite leave. Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement that “every Department of Justice attorney is required to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States. Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences.”

The Maryland case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem, 25-cv-951, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Greenbelt). The appellate case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem, 25-1345, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court case is Noem v. Abrego Garcia, 24a949.