Abrego Garcia wins latest bid to be released from US custody

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant at the center of political and legal battles as a symbol of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis found that U.S. officials lacked legal grounds to keep Abrego Garcia in custody and that his ongoing detention appeared to be “constitutionally infirm.” Abrego Garcia has been fighting Trump administration efforts to deport him while also defending against human smuggling charges in Tennessee. U.S. officials’ latest plan had been to send him to Liberia, but a judge has blocked that for now.

Xinis’ decision on Thursday is the latest setback for the Trump administration in the long-running court fight, which gained attention earlier this year after the government admitted it had sent Abrego Garcia to El Salvador by mistake. The release order follows a ruling in the Tennessee case that allowed his lawyers to collect evidence to seek dismissal of the criminal case as a vindictive and selective prosecution effort.

The federal judge presiding over his criminal case already had ordered that Abrego Garcia could go free pending trial. He has pleaded not guilty to the indictment. The immigration matter was the remaining reason the Trump administration gave for keeping him in custody.

Abrego Garcia is being held at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Pennsylvania.

In Thursday’s opinion, Xinis found that there was no final decision on the record from a U.S. immigration judge ordering that Abrego Garcia be deported, which meant that officials couldn’t hold him. An immigration judge had originally barred him from being returned to El Salvador, given the risk to his safety, but that wasn’t the same as a final deportation order, she wrote.

The judge also concluded that Abrego Garcia’s detention appeared to be “constitutionally infirm” because the Trump administration hadn’t used his months in custody to take reasonable steps to find a different country for his deportation. She noted that U.S. officials failed to act on his willingness to be sent to Costa Rica — which agreed to take him — but instead focused on exploring arrangements with African nations that refused or that he opposed. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that immigration detention cannot be used as a form of punishment, she wrote.

Xinis directed the government to provide an update on Abrego Garcia’s status later in the afternoon on Thursday.

A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment. An attorney for Abrego Garcia did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

Separate from the detention issue, the Justice Department has argued for Xinis to dissolve her order barring Abrego Garcia from being removed from the U.S. The judge hasn’t ruled on that yet.

Abrego Garcia, a father of three married to a U.S. citizen, was arrested in March and sent to El Salvador where he was immediately incarcerated without a trial in a maximum security prison. Trump administration officials acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error” but continued to oppose efforts to bring him back to the U.S.

He spent several weeks at the notorious facility known as CECOT before he was transferred to another lockup in El Salvador. After months of legal wrangling that wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court at one point, he was returned to the U.S. in June to face the fresh federal criminal charges.

Other countries

As the criminal case unfolded, the administration continued to search for options to deport Abrego Garcia. Officials explored the possibility of sending him to Uganda, Eswatini, and Ghana before settling on Liberia, according to testimony in court before Xinis.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers argued that the Trump administration was keeping their client in custody as punishment for exercising his constitutional rights. They said that the fact that the administration refused to take steps to send Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica — which agreed to accept him and where he was willing to go — was central proof of that intent.

Xinis wrote in Thursday’s ruling that the Trump administration “affirmatively misled” her by representing that Costa Rica wouldn’t accept Abrego Garcia.

“Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there,” the judge wrote, using italics to emphasize the point. She continued: “This evidently remained an inconvenient truth for” the administration.

The Trump administration has ramped up deportations to so-called third countries in cases similar to Abrego Garcia’s where immigration judges ruled that migrants can’t be deported to their home countries because they risked being tortured or killed.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville, Tennessee, who is presiding over Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, previously ruled that Abrego Garcia could be released pending trial. He was rearrested by U.S. agents days later in late August as the government renewed its efforts to find a country besides El Salvador where it could send him.

At the time, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers accused the Trump administration of trying to coerce a guilty plea by threatening to deport him to Uganda. On Oct. 3, Crenshaw ruled that Abrego Garcia had shown a “reasonable likelihood” the U.S. had charged him in retaliation for challenging his deportation in a separate court proceeding.

Uganda eventually declined to take him, according to previous testimony from a U.S. official in the civil case.

Abrego Garcia’s defense lawyers also complained in the criminal case that Attorney General Pam Bondi and other senior administration officials had made inflammatory comments about him, jeopardizing his right to a fair trial. In late October, Crenshaw issued an order finding the statements “troubling” but didn’t impose specific speech restrictions on senior members of the executive branch, writing that would be an “extraordinary step.”

The judge directed the government’s lawyers to circulate his opinion and a copy of the court’s rules throughout the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security as a reminder, and warned that he would consider sanctions for any fresh violations.

The case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem, 25-cv-2780, U.S. District Court, District of Maryland (Greenbelt).