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Greenbelt, Md. – A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from immediately deporting a Salvadoran migrant at the center of a legal and political maelstrom.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis issued a temporary restraining order on Wednesday prohibiting the Trump administration from immediately taking Salvadorian migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia into ICE custody for 72 hours after he is released from federal custody in Nashville, Tennessee.
Xinis said earlier this month that she would take action soon, in anticipation of a looming detention hearing for Abrego Garcia in his criminal case. She said she planned to issue the order with sufficient time to block the Trump administration’s stated plans to immediately begin the process of deporting Abrego Garcia again upon release, this time to a third country such as Mexico or South Sudan.
Xinis’s order said the additional time will ensure Abrego can raise any credible fears of removal to a third country, and via “the appropriate channels in the immigration process.” She also ordered the government to provide Abrego and his attorneys with “immediate written notice” of plans to transport him to a third country, again with the 72-hour notice period, “so that Abrego Garcia may assert claims of credible fear or seek any other relief available to him under the law and the Constitution.”
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Xinis’s order was handed down just three minutes before the judge in Nashville — U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw — issued a separate order on Wednesday, saying that Abrego should be released from criminal custody pending a trial date in January. Judge Crenshaw said in his order that the government failed to provide “any evidence that there is something in Abrego’s history at warrants detention.”
The plans, which Xinis ascertained over the course of a multi-day evidentiary hearing earlier this month, capped an exhausting, 19-week legal saga in the case of Abrego Garcia that spanned two continents, multiple federal courts, including the Supreme Court, and inspired countless hours of news coverage.
Still, it ultimately yielded little in the way of new answers, and Xinis likened the process to “nailing Jell-O to a wall,” and “beating a frustrated and dead horse,” among other things.
“We operate as government of laws,” she scolded lawyers for the Trump administration in one of many terse exchanges. “We don’t operate as a government of ’take my word for it.'”
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Xinis had repeatedly floated the notion of a temporary restraining order, or TRO, to ensure certain safeguards were in place to keep Abrego Garcia in ICE custody, and appeared to agree with his attorneys that such an order is likely needed to prevent their client from being removed again, without access to counsel or without a chance to appeal his country of removal.
“I’m just trying to understand what you’re trying to do,” Xinis said on more than one occasion, growing visibly frustrated.
“I’m deeply concerned that if there’s no restraint on you, Abrego will be on another plane to another country,” she told the Justice Department, noting pointedly that “that’s what you’ve done in other cases.”
Those concerns were echoed by Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in court last week.
They noted the times the Trump administration has appeared to have undercut or misrepresented its position before the court in months past, as Xinis attempted to ascertain the status of Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, and what efforts, if any, the Trump administration was making to comply with a court order to facilitate his return.
The Trump administration, who reiterated that the case is no longer in her jurisdiction, will almost certainly move to immediately appeal the restraining order to a higher court.
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The order followed an extraordinary, multi-day evidentiary hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland, where Xinis sparred with Trump administration officials as she attempted to make sense of their remarks and ascertain their next steps as they look to deport Abrego Garcia to a third country as early as Wednesday, July 16.
She said she planned to issue the order before that court date, when Abrego could possibly be released by U.S. Magistrate Judge Waverly Crenshaw.
Lawyers for Abrego Garcia, meanwhile, asked the court for more time in ICE custody, citing the many countries he might suffer persecution in — and concerns about what legal status he would have in the third country of removal.
Without legal status in Mexico, Xinis said, it would likely be a “quick road” to being deported by the country’s government to El Salvador, in violation of the withholding of removal order.
And in South Sudan, another country DHS is apparently considering, lawyers for Abrego noted the State Department currently has a Level 4 advisory in place discouraging U.S. travel due to violence and armed conflict.
Americans who do travel there should “draft a will” beforehand and designate insurance beneficiaries, according to official guidance on the site.
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In court, Xinis struggled at times to keep her own frustration and her incredulity at bay after months of back-and-forth with Justice Department attorneys.
Xinis has presided over Abrego Garcia’s civil case since March, when he was deported to El Salvador in violation of an existing court order in what Trump administration officials described as an “administrative error.”
She spent hours pressing Justice Department officials, over the course of three separate hearings, for details on the government’s plans for removing Abrego Garcia to a third country — a process she likened to “trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.”
Xinis on Friday chastised the Justice Department for presenting a DHS witness to testify under oath about ICE’s plans to deport Abrego Gaarcia one day earlier, fuming that the official, Thomas Giles, “knew nothing” about his case, and made no effort to ascertain answers — despite his rank as ICE’s third-highest enforcement official.
The four hours of testimony he provided was “fairly stunning,” and “insulting to her intelligence,” Xinis said.
Ultimately, the court would not allow the “unfettered release” of Abrego Garcia pending release from federal custody on Wednesday in Tennessee without “full-throated assurances” from the Trump administration that it will keep Abrego Garcia in ICE custody for a set period of time and locally, Xinis said, to ensure immigration officials do not “spirit him away to Nome, Alaska.”
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The Justice Department, after a short recess, declined to agree, prompting Xinis to proceed with her plans for the TRO.
Xinis told the court that ultimately, “much delta” remains between where they ended things in court, and what she is comfortable with, given the government’s actions in the past.
This was apparent on multiple occasions Friday, when Xinis told lawyers for the Trump administration that she “isn’t buying” their arguments or doesn’t “have faith” in the statements they made — reflecting an erosion of trust that could prove damaging in the longer-term.
The hearings this week capped months of back-and-forth between Xinis and the Trump administration, as she tried, over the course of 17 weeks, to track the status of a single migrant deported erroneously by the Trump administration to El Salvador—and to trace what attempts, if any, they had made facilitate his return to the U.S.
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Xinis previously took aim at what she deemed to be the lack of information submitted to the court as part of an expedited discovery process she ordered this year, describing the government’s submissions as “vague, evasive and incomplete”— and which she said demonstrated “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”
On Friday, she echoed this view. “You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it, in my view,” Xinis said.
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