A federal judge on Thursday ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from ICE custody, ruling that the Trump administration has no legal authority to continue detaining the Salvadoran migrant, who entered the United States illegally around 2011 as a teenager, and whose mistaken deportation last spring triggered a high-profile Supreme Court intervention.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis wrote in a memo that Abrego’s removal from the United States is neither “reasonably foreseeable, imminent, nor consistent with due process,” reported NBC News.
She noted that no final removal order exists that would allow the government to deport him to any third country.
“Since Abrego Garcia’s wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been re-detained, again without lawful authority,” Xinis explained.
The ruling ends — for now — a nearly yearlong legal saga that began when immigration officials admitted they violated a 2019 withholding-of-removal order by deporting Abrego to El Salvador in March. The 2019 order barred his return to his home country because of credible gang threats against him.
Abrego reportedly spent weeks in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT megaprison before the Supreme Court ordered the government in April to facilitate his return. Abrego arrived back in the United States in June, only to be immediately re-arrested and later charged in Tennessee with human smuggling — a charge he denies and to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Since late August, he has been held at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in central Pennsylvania. The Trump administration has sought to deport him to several African nations and, most recently, Costa Rica, but Xinis concluded Thursday that none of those efforts are supported by a valid removal order.
“You can’t ‘fake it ’til you make it,’” the judge said at a hearing last month, rejecting government arguments that hinged on the existence of an order that does not exist.
The Justice Department is expected to appeal. The government has repeatedly described Abrego as an MS-13 gang member, an allegation his attorneys and family deny, and for which he has never been convicted.
