Judge Orders Trump Administration to Return Wrongly Deported Man
The administration had falsely accused Kilmar Abrego Garcia of being a member of the MS-13 gang.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to return an Salvadoran man who was deported to El Salvador back to the United States by midnight Monday.
Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error,” but White House officials insist that he has ties to the MS-13 gang and have even made the brazen claim that there’s nothing that any court can do to order Abrego Garcia back because he is no longer in U.S. custody. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ruled otherwise.
“This was an illegal act,” Xinis told an attorney for the Justice Department. “Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.” Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have both accused Abrego Garcia of being an MS-13 gang member with no evidence of a criminal conviction, a fact Xinis stressed in her ruling.
“That’s just chatter, in my view. I haven’t been given any evidence,” Xinis said. “In a court of law, when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in the form of an indictment, a complaint, a criminal proceeding that has robust process so we can assess the facts.”
Abrego Garcia was found to face a legitimate fear of prosecution in his home country by a U.S. immigration judge in 2019, and was thus barred from being deported back to El Salvador. Immigration officials still rushed him onto a plane to El Salvador anyway, and now he’s being held in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison notorious for human rights abuses.
Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.
“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”
At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”
Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.
“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.” Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.