‘Reject this invitation to subvert our constitutional orders’: Conservatives urge SCOTUS to stonewall Trump’s bid to stay injunction in mass deportations case

Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

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.”

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