President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025 (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
A federal judge has slapped down an attempt by the Trump administration to block an order she gave Friday to return protected Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States after he was mistakenly shipped off to a notorious work prison in El Salvador as part of the president’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under an 18th-century wartime authority.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Sunday issued a 22-page opinion saying she would not back off from forcing the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to return Garcia, a protected citizen deported on March 15, to U.S. soil after ordering the government to do so Friday. The Justice Department filed an emergency motion to stay Xinis’ preliminary injunction on Saturday with the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and lower court, “given the urgency of harms to the government,” the DOJ filings said. They called Xinis’ order “indefensible” and impossible to carry out on account of where he’s being held.
“Foremost, it commands Defendants to do something they have no independent authority to do: Make El Salvador release Abrego Garcia, and send him to America,” DOJ lawyers said in the appeals court motion. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is presently being held in El Salvador, by the El Salvadoran Government. The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador. … No federal court has the power to command the Executive to engage in a certain act of foreign relations; that is the exclusive prerogative of Article II, immune from superintendence by Article III. But that is exactly what this order does. Indeed, it is the only thing it does — requiring Defendants, on the clock, to try to force a foreign country to take a discrete action.”
