Kilmar Abrego García was released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody Thursday after a federal judge ruled his continued detention was unlawful.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered officials to release the 30-year-old undocumented immigrant and longtime Maryland resident in part to ensure he has a fair immigration process after finding that Justice Department attorneys had “misled” the court at a hearing last month. Government lawyers and an ICE witness alleged officers had to deport him to the African nation of Liberia because Costa Rica had reneged on a deal to offer him refuge.
But the judge, citing reporting by The Washington Post and other media outlets, noted that Costa Rica had “never wavered” in its commitment to accept Abrego. He was released from a Pennsylvania detention facility shortly before 5 p.m., his lawyers said.
Xinis was the first federal judge to order the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego’s return to the United States after immigration officers illegally deported him this year to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador. The Trump administration stonewalled Xinis for weeks and returned Abrego only after the Justice Department obtained a criminal indictment against him for human smuggling in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
“Since Abrego Garcia’s return from wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been re-detained, again without lawful authority,” Xinis wrote. “For this reason, the Court will grant Abrego Garcia’s Petition for immediate release from ICE custody.”
Despite the complex history of Abrego’s case, Xinis wrote that the reason for releasing him from ICE detention is “quite simple”: Abrego doesn’t have a deportation order. The judge who heard his 2019 deportation case, and barred his removal to El Salvador, never issued a “final order of removal,” a necessary step before deportation. Therefore, Xinis wrote, ICE had no lawful basis to hold him.
The White House and the Department of Homeland Security vowed to challenge the order.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, who had previously vowed that Abrego “will never go free on American soil,” called Xinis’ decision “naked judicial activism by an Obama appointed judge.”
“This order lacks any valid legal basis and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts,” McLaughlin wrote on social media.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt alleged that Abrego is in the U.S. “illegally” and is a smuggler and “a proven gang member,” but each of those allegations is still pending in the courts.
Although Abrego has indicated that his preferred country of deportation is Costa Rica, his lawyers argue that his illegal deportation — and his legal return to the U.S. — have created fresh pathways to legal residency for Abrego. He could apply for asylum or a green card through his U.S. citizen wife, they said.
On Thursday afternoon, his lawyers said his family was celebrating the decision.
“Everyone’s super excited, although everyone’s quite apprehensive of what comes next,” said his lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg. “This is certainly not the end of the story. I wish it were.”
Abrego’s case has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportation campaign, catapulting him from an ordinary worker living in Maryland into an international figure with the White House and other world leaders weighing his fate.
Abrego’s attorneys have argued that his continued detention in immigration custody and the criminal charges pending against him in Tennessee are part of a retaliatory campaign by the Trump administration to punish him for challenging his deportation this year.
The judge overseeing the human smuggling case recently concluded there was “some evidence the prosecution may be vindictive” and has ordered additional hearings on the matter. Abrego has pleaded not guilty in that case and is scheduled to go to trial in January.
In her 31-page ruling, Xinis related the “tortured history” of the case: Abrego said he came to the U.S. illegally as a 16-year-old fleeing death threats from the Barrio 18 gang that was extorting his family. He missed the one-year deadline to apply for asylum, and in 2019, after a brief encounter with Prince George’s County police, he was detained for deportation. After a hearing in 2019, a Baltimore immigration judge barred officials from deporting him to El Salvador because of the gang threat.
Six years passed before immigration officers rearrested him in March, with his son in the car, and illegally deported him three days later to a Salvadoran prison. Xinis wrote that he and more than 250 other immigrants from Venezuela and El Salvador were “systematically beaten and tortured.”
Officials returned him in June to face federal smuggling charges in Tennessee, and he was briefly released in that case after judges ruled that prosecutors had failed to prove he posed a danger or a flight risk.
Before his release, he turned down an offer to plead guilty to the smuggling charges and be deported to Costa Rica, a Spanish-speaking country widely regarded as safe. When he refused, ICE rearrested him and threatened to deport him to Uganda, then Eswatini, then Ghana, and finally to Liberia.
“Although [the government] might eventually get it right, they have not as of today,” Xinis wrote. “Thus, Abrego Garcia’s detention for the stated purpose of third-country removal cannot continue.”
The U.S. government could refile an immigration case against him and attempt to deport him to another country, lawyers said, but whether that will happen remained unclear Thursday.
His lawyers had attempted to reopen his immigration court case to apply for legal residency, but a judge rejected that move. His legal team has appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
At a lengthy hearing last month, Xinis questioned the government’s claims that Costa Rica had reneged on its promise in August to accept Abrego. Trump administration lawyers had contended, in records initially filed under seal, that Costa Rica insisted on additional negotiations.
“That is not an open door,” Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign told Xinis of Costa Rica at the Nov. 20 hearing.
They said the West African nation of Liberia was his only option.
But Xinis pointed out the lack of proof of Costa Rica’s reversal — no diplomatic note, no letter, no witness with direct knowledge.
“You have not shown me the work here. Okay?” Xinis told Ensign during the hearing. “Can you just show me, just me, the underlying work on that?”
Ensign did not have an explanation, stating, “Your Honor, I would have to talk to the clients about that. I don’t — I don’t know the answer to that.”
“It’s so odd to me,” Xinis replied. “It’s so odd.”
The next day, The Post reported that Costa Rica’s security minister, Mario Zamora Cordero, said nothing had changed since the nation’s August letter promising to accept Abrego.
“Costa Rica’s offer to receive Mr. Abrego Garcia for humanitarian reasons stands,” he said in a statement. Soon afterward, Abrego’s lawyers filed the article in the court record.
In her ruling Thursday, Xinis called news reports on Costa Rica’s continued willingness to take Abrego in “an inconvenient truth.”
“Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” she wrote. “They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica does not wish to receive him” and that Costa Rica will no longer “accept the transfer” of him.
“But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there,” Xinis wrote.
Xinis noted in her opinion Thursday that the misrepresentation appeared to be part of a pattern of Trump administration officials resisting her orders. At least six times, she said, she’d instructed the government to send officials with specific knowledge of Garcia’s case to court prepared to testify.
ICE official John Cantu, who testified at the Nov. 20 hearing that Costa Rica was “not an option” for Abrego, was the latest instance, Xinis said, of officials arriving “unprepared or defiant in their refusal to answer questions.”
Abrego’s lawyers, in a separate motion, have asked Xinis to impose sanctions — a move she said in her ruling Thursday she is still considering.
CASA, an immigrant-rights organization headquartered in Maryland, called the ruling “a major victory for due process.”
“It’s a moment of joy and relief,” said Lydia Walther-Rodriguez, the chief of organizing and leadership at CASA, which has accompanied Abrego’s family to hearings and rallied outside courthouses in support. “Kilmar finally gets to return home to his family, where he belongs. No one should be separated from their loved ones while fighting for justice.”
Attorney Benjamin Osorio said Abrego “is eager to reunite with his family and continue defending his rights through the proper legal channels.”
“We appreciate Judge Xinis’s careful attention to the facts and the legal standards that govern his case,” he said.
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