WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court granted a temporary pause Monday on a judge’s order requiring the Trump administration to return a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the case is “stayed pending further order” of the court.
On Friday, a federal judge in Maryland had ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia by midnight on Monday.
Over the weekend, the administration appealed to the 4th Circuit Court but lost by a 3-0 vote.
“The United States 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,” wrote Judge Stephanie Thacker, an Obama appointee. She said it was “unconscionable” for the government to argue that the “courts are powerless to intervene.”
Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court on Monday to toss out the judge’s order, or at a minimum, put it on hold temporarily.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, had ordered “unprecedented relief: dictating to the United States that it must not only negotiate with a foreign country to return an enemy alien on foreign soil, but also succeed by 11:59 p.m. tonight.”
Both sides agree that due to an “administrative error,” Abrego-Garcia was flown with other detained men from Texas to a notorious prison in El Salvador on March 15.
Two planes carried alleged Venezuelan gang members who were deported as “alien enemies” under the terms of a 1798 law that gives the president wartime powers.
The third plane carried migrants who had a final order of removal under the U.S. immigration laws. Abrego Garcia had such a removal order, but it said he must not be returned to El Salvador.
“This was an oversight,” Robert L. Cerna, the acting field director in Harlingen, Texas, said in a sworn statement. “The removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego-Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13.”
Since then, however, the administration has refused to seek his return and insisted judges have no role in the matter.
“The Constitution charges the President, not federal district courts, with the conduct of foreign diplomacy and protecting the Nation against foreign terrorists,” Sauer wrote in Monday’s appeal.
The two sides also offer sharply different portraits of Abrego Garcia.
The administration says the native of El Salvador entered this country illegally in 2011 and was arrested in 2019 and held after he was identified “as a ranking member of the deadly MS-13 gang.”
He had a hearing before an immigration judge who agreed the “evidence show[ed] that [Abrego Garcia] is a verified member of MS-13.”
The Board of Immigration Appeals affirmed that conclusion. But in a subsequent hearing, an immigration judge decided he should not be removed to El Salvador because he could face gang persecution.
He was then released. He had been employed as a sheet metal worker in Baltimore. But in February, the Trump administration declared the MS-13 gang to be a “foreign terrorist organization, and agents went in search of identified gang members.
Abrego-Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, says her husband has no criminal record and has been a good father to three children. She said he came to this country at age 16 to escape the gangs in El Salvador.
“My husband, Kilmar, was abducted by the U.S. government,” she told reporters at a rally on Friday. “In the blink of an eye, our three children lost their father, and I lost the love of my life.”
The judges who ruled on the case said the government did not show proof that Abrego Garcia had been gang member.
“The government’s ‘evidence’ was thin, to say the least,” Thacker said. It was based on him “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie” and a “vague and uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s Western clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
