U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has temporarily barred a lower court’s order to return Maryland man Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an alleged MS-13 gang member involved in human trafficking who was deported to an El Salvador mega prison, to the United States by Monday at midnight.
Roberts issued an administrative stay, immediately halting the Federal judge’s demand for Abrego Garcia’s return.
Abrego Garcia was deported on March 15, 2025, during a mass deportation operation that targeted nearly 240 alleged members of Latin American gangs.
U.S. Federal District Judge Paula Xinis said in her filing that Abrego Garcia’s deportation violated the Immigration and Nationality Act, granted him no legal process, and caused “irreparable harm,” putting him in a prison filled with gang violence where he could be a target, per the filing.
In 2019, Abrego Garcia was granted withholding of removal, meaning he was legally protected from being deported back to his home country of El Salvador, protecting him from potential gang violence, according to U.S. Federal District Judge Paula Xinis’ Friday filing.
Federal attorneys asked the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to freeze Xinis’ ruling but denied the motion.
White House remains firm in deportation decision
In response to the lower courts rulings, the White House took the injunction to the U.S. Supreme Court, requesting that they reverse the lower court’s order to return Abrego Garcia to the States.
“The order compels the government to allow Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to enter the United States on demand, or suffer the judicial consequences,” the filing said. “The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador, nor can it compel El Salvador to follow a federal judge’s bidding.”
Although the government acknowledged an error in deporting him, the Trump administration remains steadfast in its decision to deport Abrego Garcia, along with three planeloads of Venezuelan and Salvadoran deportees to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, all of whom were accused of being members of criminal organizations.
Invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, Trump used the wartime law that grants the U.S. to immediately deport people from a foreign nation at war with the United States without due process if they belong to a “hostile nation or government” that threatens the territory of the U.S. with “any invasion or predatory incursion.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News’s Shannon Bream that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have testified that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, an international criminal gang and a US-designated terrorist organization.
“His lawyers have argued he should be here because he was studying to be an electrician. Let me give you a comparison,” Bondi said, sharing that three violent MS-13 gang members were apprehended in Florida recently, accused of violently stabbing an individual more than one hundred times as part of a gang initiation.
Bondi said one of the accused gang members was living as a drywall hanger in Florida. “So, the argument that, because these people are living among us, these illegal aliens from El Salvador, means they’re not part of a gang,” she added. “That’s how they’re hiding. That’s how they’re succeeding.”
Abrego Garcia has not been charged or convicted of any violent crimes.
Because of this, Judge Xinis wrote in a legal opinion on Sunday that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was “Wholly lawless,” per The Associated Press.
“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” she added.