BALTIMORE — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose misguided deportation helped galvanize opposition to President Donald Trump. immigration policywas released from immigration detention on Thursday, and the judge temporarily blocked any further attempts to detain him.
Abrego Garcia is currently barred from deportation to his home country of El Salvador, thanks to a 2019 immigration court ruling that found he had a “well-founded fear” of danger there. However, the Trump administration said he could not remain in the United States. Over the past few months, government officials have said they would deport him to the United States. Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana and, more recently, Liberia.
Abrego Garcia is fighting his deportation in federal court in Maryland, where his lawyers argue the administration is manipulating the immigration system to punish him for successfully challenging a previous deportation.
Here's what you need to know about the latest developments in the case:
Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen whose wife and child are American. lived in Maryland for many years. As a teenager, he immigrated to the US illegally to join his brother, who had become a US citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from deportation back to his home country.
Although he was allowed to live and work in the United States under the supervision of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he was not granted resident status. Earlier this year he was wrongly deported to El Salvador, despite the previous court decision.
When Abrego Garcia was deported in March, he was held in notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.
The Trump administration initially fought efforts to bring him back to the US, but eventually complied after the US Supreme Court ruled. returned to the USA in June only to receive an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia was held in a Tennessee prison for more than two months before being released on Friday, August 22, to await trial in Maryland under house arrest.
His freedom lasted a weekend. The following Monday, he appeared at the Baltimore Immigration Office to register and was immediately taken into immigration custody. Authorities announced plans to deport him to several African countries, but they were blocked by a ruling from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland.
On Thursday, after months of legal challenges and hearings, Xinis ruled that Abrego Garcia should be released immediately. Her decision hinged on what was likely a procedural error by the immigration judge who heard his case in 2019.
Typically, in such cases, the immigration judge will first issue an order of removal. The judge would then essentially freeze the order, issuing a “withholding of removal” order, according to Memphis immigration attorney Andrew Rankin.
In the Abrego Garcia case, the judge granted a stay of deportation to El Salvador because he believed Abrego Garcia's life might be in danger there. However, the judge never took the first step – he ordered the removal. The government argued in the Xinis court that the deportation order could have been presupposed, but the judge disagreed.
Without a final order of removal, Abrego Garcia cannot be deported, Zinis ruled.
The only way to get a removal order is to go back to immigration court and ask for one, Rankin said. But reopening the immigration case is a gamble because Abrego Garcia's lawyers will likely seek protection from deportation in the form of asylum or some other type of relief.
One problem is that immigration courts are officially part of the executive branch, and judges there are not generally considered to be as independent as federal judges.
“There may be independence in some areas, but if the administration wants a certain outcome, it appears they are going to put pressure on people to get that outcome,” Rankin said. “I hope he gets a fair shake and two lawyers make the case – some win, some lose – rather than taking the case to an immigration judge with a 95% denial rate where everyone in the world knows how it's going to go.”
Alternatively, the government could appeal Zinis' ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and try to have her decision overturned, Rankin said. If the appeals court had agreed with the government that a final order of removal was implied, there would have been no need to reopen the immigration case.
Under Xinis' order, Abrego Garcia was released from immigration detention in Pennsylvania on Thursday evening and allowed to return home for the first time in months. However, he was also told to report to an immigration officer in Baltimore early the next morning.
Fearing he would be detained again, his lawyers asked Xinis to issue him a temporary restraining order. Xinis filed the order early Friday morning. It prohibits immigration officials from returning Abrego Garcia to custody, at least for now. Hearings on this issue could take place as early as next week.
Meanwhile in Tennessee, Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty in a criminal case in which he is charged with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling.
Prosecutors say he received money to transport people who were in the country illegally within the United States. The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage A Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm conversation with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed their suspicions of contraband among themselves. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving only with a warning.
Abrego Garcia asked U.S. District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw drop smuggling charges on the grounds of “selective or vindictive prosecution.”
Crenshaw previously found “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be retaliatory in nature” and said many of the statements by Trump administration officials were “cause for concern.” Crenshaw specifically cited Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's statement on Fox News, which appeared to suggest that the Justice Department indicted Abrego Garcia because he won his wrongful deportation case.
Both sides are arguing over whether senior Justice Department officials, including Blanche, could be called to testify in the case.
