President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A federal judge has slapped down an attempt by the Trump administration to block an order she gave Friday to return protected Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States after he was mistakenly shipped off to a notorious work prison in El Salvador as part of the president’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under an 18th-century wartime authority.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Sunday issued a 22-page opinion saying she would not back off from forcing the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to return Garcia, a protected citizen deported on March 15, to U.S. soil after ordering the government to do so Friday. The Justice Department filed an emergency motion to stay Xinis’ preliminary injunction on Saturday with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and lower court, “given the urgency of harms to the government,” the DOJ filings said. They called Xinis’ order “indefensible” and impossible to carry out on account of where he’s being held.
“Foremost, it commands Defendants to do something they have no independent authority to do: Make El Salvador release Abrego Garcia, and send him to America,” DOJ lawyers said in the appeals court motion. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is presently being held in El Salvador, by the El Salvadoran Government. The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador. … No federal court has the power to command the Executive to engage in a certain act of foreign relations; that is the exclusive prerogative of Article II, immune from superintendence by Article III. But that is exactly what this order does. Indeed, it is the only thing it does — requiring Defendants, on the clock, to try to force a foreign country to take a discrete action.”
Xinis, a Barack Obama appointee, dismissed the DOJ’s claim about the Trump administration having its hands tied with Abrego Garcia. She said the U.S. can’t prop up the prison in El Salvador as “one of the tools” in the government’s deportation shed — as Noem has previously claimed, according to Xinis — and then try to act like nothing can be done.
“Surely, Defendants do not mean to suggest that they have wholesale erased the substantive and procedural protections of the INA (Immigration and Nationality Act) in one fell swoop by dropping those individuals in [the prion] without recourse,” Xinis wrote. “Instead, the record reflects that Defendants have ‘outsource[d] part of the [United States’] prison system. Thus, just as in any other contract facility, Defendants can and do maintain the power to secure and transport their detainees, Abrego Garcia included.”
Xinis on Friday granted a preliminary injunction and gave the DOJ just over three days to facilitate bringing Abrego Garcia back to the country, referring to his deportation as “an illegal act.” The 29-year-old was sent to El Salvador in error as part of President 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. Abrego 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 confessed to the lower court on Friday that his deportation was an “administrative error.”
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Xinis noted Sunday how the U.S. government and administration officials have repeatedly claimed “without any evidence” that Abrego Garcia is a member of the gang MS-13. Even if that were true, Xinis pointed out how Abrego Garcia is being housed in El Salvador with inmates belonging to MS-13’s “chief rival gang” — Barrio 18. She said it was the threat of retaliation and attacks from Barrio 18 members that got Abrego Garcia out of El Salvador in the first place.
“Abrego Garcia will suffer irreparably were he not accorded his requested relief,” Xinis said. “The risk of harm shocks the conscience. Defendants have forcibly put him in a facility that intentionally mixes rival gang members without any regard for protecting the detainees from harm at the hands of the gangs.”
The judge asserted that Trump admin officials and El Salvador’s government have refused to tell “anyone” why Abrego Garcia was “returned to the very country to which he cannot return” and being held at such a dangerous prison. Attempts by Law&Crime to reach the DOJ for comment Sunday were unsuccessful.
“That silence is telling,” Xinis said. “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. Having confessed grievous error, the Defendants now argue that this Court lacks the power to hear this case, and they lack the power to order Abrego Garcia’s return.”
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The Trump administration’s “error” in the Abrego Garcia case 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 insisted 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.”
Xinis said that the DOJ has failed to prove why her order fails in the eyes of the law, so she had no other choice than to grant “the narrowest, daresay only, relief warranted: to order that Defendants return Abrego Garcia to the United States.” It was unclear Sunday what Abrego Garcia’s custody status was in El Salvador.
“In the end, Defendants’ redressability argument rings hollow,” Xinis concluded. “As their counsel suggested at the hearing, this is not about Defendants’ inability to return Abrego Garcia, but their lack of desire.”
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