Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday temporarily blocked a lower court order that would have required the Trump administration to return a Maryland man it mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
Roberts’s brief order halted a ruling issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, who gave the administration until 11:59 p.m. Monday to “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The order paused that deadline “pending further order” and gave Abrego Garcia’s attorneys until 5 p.m. Tuesday to respond to the Trump administration’s emergency appeal.
The emergency request, filed by the Department of Justice on Monday morning, argued the administration cannot compel El Salvador to reverse the deportation.
“The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador,” Solicitor General John Sauer said.
Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national, has lived in Maryland since entering the United States illegally in 2012. He was arrested in March and deported days later to CECOT, a notorious Salvadoran prison, despite a 2019 court order blocking his removal to El Salvador. The Trump administration has acknowledged the deportation to El Salvador was an error but said he is a member of the MS-13 gang, stripping him of protections under immigration law.
However, Sauer argued Abrego Garcia is an “alien enemy” and said he is affiliated with MS-13, which the U.S. government designates as a terrorist organization.
“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error … that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations,” Sauer said. “The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador.”
Just minutes before the DOJ rushed its appeal to the high court, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the administration’s bid to halt Xinis’s order. In scathing language, the three-judge panel accused the DOJ of ignoring due process and later suspending a lawyer who struggled to defend the deportation in court.
“The Government cannot be permitted to ignore the Fifth Amendment, deny due process of law, and remove anyone it wants, simply because it claims the victims of its lawlessness are members of a gang,” the panel said.
Abrego Garcia’s attorney denied the gang affiliation and said the government provided no evidence beyond a single Department of Homeland Security informant.
In a response to the Supreme Court just after Roberts’s order, Abrego Garcia’s counsel argued its client now sits thousands of miles away in an El Salvadoran prison as the “product of a Kafka-esque mistake.”
“The Government ‘can — and does — return wrongfully removed migrants as a matter of course,'” his attorneys said. “The United States has never claimed that it is powerless to correct its error, and before today, it did not contend that doing so would cause it any harm.”
“That is because the only one harmed by the current state of affairs is Abrego Garcia,” they continued.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ASKS SUPREME COURT TO INTERVENE IN CASE OF MISTAKEN DEPORTATION
Though Roberts’s decision was a short-term win for the Trump administration, it doesn’t mean the justices will ultimately side with the government. In a similar case earlier this year, Roberts stayed a judge’s deadline to resume foreign aid payments, only to later rule against the administration.
For now, Abrego Garcia will remain in El Salvador while the Supreme Court weighs what comes next.
