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President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Monday, March 31, 2025 (Pool via AP).
A judge in Maryland has ordered the federal government to return a man to the U.S. who was mistakenly shipped off to a notorious work prison in El Salvador as part of the Trump administration’s severely botched deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants under an 18th-century wartime authority, the use of which has already been halted by the courts.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Friday granted a preliminary injunction and gave the Justice Department just over three days to facilitate bringing Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia back to the country, referring to his deportation as “an illegal act,” according to a report from The Guardian.
“Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway,” she reportedly said.
Garcia was sent to El Salvador in error as part of President Donald Trump’s proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rush through mass deportations without providing due process to those being flown out of the country, often not to their country of origin.
Garcia was in the country with protected legal status at the time of his deportation. His wife and 5-year-old child are U.S. citizens. The DOJ attorney reportedly told the court on Friday that his deportation was an “administrative error.”
“The facts are conceded,” acting Deputy Director for the Office of Immigration Litigation Erez Reuveni said, according to ABC News. “Mr. Abrego Garcia should not have been removed.”
The Trump administration’s “error” follows the government’s apparent violation of a direct order from a different federal judge, who instructed the DOJ to ensure that any migrants on the planes that left for El Salvador on March 15 — one of which was carrying Garcia — returned to the country immediately. The order came from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg during a hearing that took place shortly after the deportation planes took off.
The government has since asserted that because Boasberg’s directive was oral and not memorialized in his subsequent written order, it did not have to be followed.
Xinis appeared to make a very clear reference to that controversy during Friday’s hearing.
“I am going to grant the motion for preliminary injunction I’ve reviewed, and I’ll read this word for word, so that there is no dispute that the oral order is the written order,” she said, per ABC News. “The two defendants are hereby ordered to facilitate the return of plaintiff Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States by no later than 11:59 p.m. on Monday, April 7, 2025.”
The statute — which has only been invoked three times previously, all during wars — authorizes the president to summarily remove “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile nation or government” when there is “declared war” against it or when it has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States” an “invasion or predatory incursion.” In a controversial and novel use of the power, Trump declared the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) had committed or attempted an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” such that any member of the group was summarily removable under the act.
During a hearing in the case before Boasberg on Thursday, the judge similarly excoriated the DOJ for unlawfully deporting Garcia in a mad dash to make good on the administration’s promises to increase deportations of illegal immigrants.
“So what you were willing to do, by trying to do this as quickly as possible and avoid being enjoined by the court, was to risk putting people on those planes who shouldn’t have been on the planes in the first place,” Boasberg said during Thursday’s hearing. “We have the example of Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia and you’ve admitted, haven’t you — not you personally, but the administration — has admitted that he was removed based on error, right?”
Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Immigration Litigation Drew Ensign confirmed the wrongful removal of Garcia, but claimed he was not removed under the AEA, a response Boasberg did not appear to take at face value, telling the attorney that they “haven’t quite gotten to the bottom” of that matter yet.
Circling back to the removal of Garcia, Boasberg said: “In that group of passengers for three planes that you’re rushing to get out of the country before a judge can act, and low and behold, at least one — that we know of — shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”
What seemed to have Boasberg taken back most Thursday was how Ensign and the DOJ claimed to have no knowledge of what the Trump administration was doing with the flights when he asked them at the 5 p.m. hearing on March 15.
“I asked you point blank whether there were any removal under this proclamation planned in the next 24 or 48 hours, remember that?” Boasberg asked Ensign, to which he said he did.
“And you said you didn’t know, but that you could investigate and report back … So I recessed the hearing from 5:22 p.m. to 6 p.m. and when we came back you still couldn’t give me any information about the plane,” Boasberg recalled. “So what I want to know here, as an officer of the court, you’re telling me that you had no knowledge whatsoever between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. on that day that planes were in the air or shortly would be in the air? With no knowledge whatsoever?”
Garcia’s wife on Friday said she would do virtually anything to have her husband back, per the Guardian.
“If I had all the money in the world, I would spend it all just to buy one thing: a phone call to hear Kilmar’s voice again,” she reportedly said. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, I miss you so much, and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children.”
The White House, on the other hand, provided little more than a glib response on Friday evening that indicated the administration would not be abiding by Xinis’ order.
“We suggest the Judge contact [El Salvador’s] President [Nayib] Bukele because we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
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