Trump loses emergency appeal to halt Maryland deportation case

David Voreacos, Bloomberg News on Apr 17, 2025

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A U.S. appeals court denied an emergency motion by the Trump administration to halt a federal judge’s effort to facilitate the return of a Maryland man wrongly deported to a prison in his native El Salvador, saying the Justice Department’s conduct was shocking to Americans’ “sense of liberty.”

In a blistering opinion, an appellate panel said the Justice Department must abide by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’s order that it provide wide-ranging evidence about why it hasn’t sought the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He was deported March 15 despite a 2019 court order saying he couldn’t be sent to his native country.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote Thursday. “It claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

On April 10, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration, which admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported through an administrative error, must take steps to “facilitate” his release from Salvadoran custody and return to the U.S. The high court largely upheld Xinis’s earlier order to do so.

Justice Department lawyers have complained in court filings that Xinis overreached her authority, which doesn’t extend to foreign affairs. President Donald Trump and others in his administration say Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang. In their appeal Wednesday, the U.S. said Xinis is acting “in service of a member of a foreign terrorist organization with no valid right to be in the United States.”

But Wilkinson wrote that regardless of whether Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member or not, he is entitled to due process of law. He also warned that the Trump administration must respect the authority of judges.

“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” Wilkinson wrote. “And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?”

Wilkinson, the author of the 3-0 opinion, was appointed to the court by former President Ronald Reagan.

Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. in 2011 to live with family and has no criminal record in the U.S. or El Salvador, according to his lawyers. He was lawfully living in Maryland before he was sent last month with about 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.

An immigration judge had ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia couldn’t be sent to El Salvador because he faced gang-based extortion.

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