A federal judge in a scathing decision on Sunday said the Trump administration had no legal grounds to arrest, detain and deport a Salvadoran national from the United States to a prison in his home country, saying the decision was “wholly lawless.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in a 22-page decision ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Secretary Kristi Noem to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States.

“Neither the United States nor El Salvador have told anyone why he was returned to the very country to which he cannot return, or why he is detained at CECOT,” Xinis wrote, referring to the El Salvador prison now holding Abrego Garcia.

“That silence is telling. As Defendants acknowledge, they 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.”

“To avoid clear irreparable harm, and because equity and justice compels it, the Court grants the narrowest, daresay only, relief warranted: to order that Defendants return Abrego Garcia to the United States.”

The decision includes a number of new details about Garcia.

Xinis wrote that in 2019, an immigration judge granted Garcia withholding of removal that protected him from being returned to El Salvador. This protection was meant to protect a non-U.S. citizen, in this case Garcia, from being sent to a country where, more likely than not, he would face persecution risking his “life or freedom.”

The protection was granted to Abrego Garcia because the judge concluded that El Salvador’s Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.”

DHS did not appeal this decision, which was finalized in 2019, during the Trump presidency.

But on March 12, Abrego Garcia while driving home from work with his son was stopped by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.

“The officers had no warrant for his arrest and no lawful basis to take him into custody; they told him only that his “status had changed,” the judge wrote.

Abrego Garcia was first sent to an ICE facility in Baltimore before being sent to detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas, and then to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, which the judge described as a “notorious supermax prison known for widespread human rights violations.”

Abrego Garcia was one of dozens of men sent to the prison from the United States, but Xinis argued his case was unique.

“Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal. Nor does any evidence suggest that Abrego Garcia is being held in CECOT at the behest of Salvadoran authorities to answer for crimes in that country. Rather, his detention appears wholly lawless,” she wrote.

The administration has argued that Xinis lacks the power to hear the case, but Xinis rejected all of their arguments, writing that “defendants are wrong on several fronts” in part because Abrego Garcia is not challenging his confinement in the United States but his deportation to the prison in El Salvador.

She accused the administration of clinging “to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person migrant and U.S. citizen alike to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction,” Xinis wrote. “As a practical matter, the facts say otherwise.”

Xinis argued the administration is effectively saying that it does not have the power to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, but she wrote that their argument “rings hollow.”

“First, Defendants can and do return wrongfully removed migrants as a matter of course,” she wrote.

“In the end, Defendants’ redressability argument rings hollow. As their counsel suggested at the hearing, this is not about Defendants’ inability to return Abrego Garcia, but their lack of desire,” Xinis wrote.

Xinis quoted a lawyer for the U.S. government, Erez Reuveni, who has since been suspended. Reuveni in a previous appearance in court said he had asked DHS why it could not return Abrego Garcia and had not “received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi in a statement said any attorney at the Justice Department who “fails to abide” by an order to “zealously advocate on behalf of the United States” would face consequences.

Xinis said Abrego Garcia should be returned because he had demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of his argument that he should not have been deported, and that there was a likelihood of severe harm if he wasn’t given relief.

“Defendants effectuated his detention in one of the most notoriously inhumane and dangerous prisons in the world,” Xinis wrote of Abrego Garcia. “Defendants even embrace that reality as part of its well-orchestrated mission to use CECOT as a form of punishment and deterrence.”

She noted that Noem had been videoed in front of caged prisoners at CECOT warning imprisonment there was the consequence people would face for entering the United States illegally.