For much of the past two months, the White House has assumed a defiant stance toward a series of court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to take steps to secure the freedom of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to El Salvador in March.
But the administration is also fighting a separate court order in another case in which officials have been told to seek the release of a different, and lesser-known, immigrant who was expelled to El Salvador on the same set of flights as Mr. Abrego Garcia.
That man, a 20-year-old Venezuelan identified in court papers as Cristian, was flown to El Salvador on March 15 with scores of other immigrants. He was among nearly 140 Venezuelans deported without hearings after Trump officials accused them of being members of the Tren de Aragua street gang and deemed them subject to President Trump’s proclamation invoking an 18th-century wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act.
Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is a Salvadoran citizen, was deported on one of those flights even though an earlier court order expressly prohibited him from being sent back to his homeland. Something similar happened to Cristian: He was expelled from the United States despite a ruling that his removal violated a previous court settlement intended to protect young migrants with pending asylum cases.
Last month, Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, echoing the judge in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Cristian’s return by asking the Salvadoran government to send him back to U.S. soil. But on Tuesday, Judge Gallagher agreed to put her own order on hold until Thursday to give the Justice Department time to appeal it.
The two cases, both of which are playing out in Federal District Court in Maryland, exemplify the way in which the White House has sought new and aggressive methods to expel immigrants from the United States. The cases also reflect the increasingly recalcitrant attitude that the administration has adopted toward judicial orders — especially in deportation cases.
In her initial order, on April 23, Judge Gallagher said Cristian should not have been deported because he was shielded by the protections of a settlement agreement that immigration lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security had reached in the waning days of the Biden administration.
Under that agreement, unaccompanied minors who arrive in the United States and claim asylum cannot be removed from the country until their cases are fully resolved.
Over the weekend, the Justice Department asked Judge Gallagher to set aside that order, saying that if Cristian were returned to the United States, immigration officials would reject his asylum claim — a move that would lift the protections of the settlement agreement.
Department lawyers explained that his asylum application would be denied because he was a terrorist. The department has not disclosed what evidence it has to support that claim beyond the fact that the State Department has designated Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization.
During a hearing on Tuesday, Judge Gallagher refused to reverse her original ruling, noting that even if the government ultimately plans to reject Cristian’s asylum claim, it would have to do so in a process that played out in the U.S. courts.
She told the Justice Department that the administration “can’t skip to the end” and simply leave Cristian in El Salvador because it believes it would be futile to bring him back.
Still, Judge Gallagher acknowledged that if Trump officials did return Cristian and denied his asylum application, he might not be able to remain in the United States.
“It may be that the result here for Cristian is no asylum,” she said. “I think people who have been following the news for the past four months would not be surprised if that’s the end result here.”
The cases in Maryland are not only the ones in which the Justice Department, acting on behalf of the White House, is fighting against efforts to bring deported people back to U.S. soil.
Last month, in a case in Massachusetts, department lawyers tried to convince a federal judge that the administration had not violated his order requiring that immigrants have the opportunity to challenge their removal to a country not their own if they have reason to fear being sent there.
While the lawyers admitted that four Venezuelan men accused of being Tren de Aragua members had recently been sent to El Salvador from a U.S. military base in Cuba without a chance to question their removal, they gave a narrow reason as to why. The lawyers claimed that the judge’s order covered only officials from the Department of Homeland Security, and the men had technically been sent from Cuba by Defense Department officials.
Next week, a federal judge in Louisiana plans to hold a hearing to determine whether Trump officials wrongly expelled a 2-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with her mother.
The judge, Terry A. Doughty, who was appointed by Mr. Trump, intends to examine the government’s claim that the mother requested that the girl — known only as V.M.L. — be deported with her. Lawyers for the family have said that the mother and father wanted V.M.L. to remain in the United States.
In yet another deportation case, a federal judge in Washington has set a hearing for Wednesday to discuss whether he can order the return of all of the Venezuelan men who were deported with Cristian to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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