A federal judge on Monday kept in place a temporary order prohibiting the Trump administration from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego García, saying she wants officials to tell her their intentions while she considers how to rule next because she doesn’t trust that he won’t again be deported illegally.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said she was concerned the administration might try to take Abrego back into custody “in the middle of the night” before she could take steps to ensure due process in his case, and she dressed down a Justice Department lawyer for repeated misrepresentations by the U.S. government.
“Once again, I’m making a finding that these representations, which are misrepresentations, are in bad faith,” she told Justice Department lawyer Ernesto H. Molina Jr., saying she was “beyond impatient” with government lawyers putting false information in their legal briefs.
The rebuke marked another tense moment in a long-running legal showdown between the White House and the federal courts. Xinis said the bar against Abrego’s rearrest will remain in place until his lawyers and the government have each filed further legal briefs.
Earlier this month, Xinis ordered the Trump administration to release the 30-year-old undocumented immigrant and longtime Maryland resident after finding that the government lacked a deportation order in his case.
She also found that Justice Department attorneys and an ICE witness had misled her when they said they had to deport Abrego to the African nation of Liberia because Costa Rica, in Central America, had reneged on a deal to offer him refuge.
A high-ranking Costa Rican official told The Washington Post in November that the country’s willingness to accept Abrego had not wavered.
In response to Xinis’s Dec. 11 order, the administration released Abrego but immediately took steps that appeared aimed at bringing him back into custody. Hours after the order, an immigration judge agreed to correct a “scrivener’s error” in a 2019 immigration ruling that had failed to clearly order Abrego’s deportation.
Worried that officials would re-arrest Abrego, his lawyers asked for a temporary restraining order against it, which Xinis granted. But she noted her uncertainty about the government’s plans, and Justice Department lawyers did not clear up the issue in a legal filing that, without specifying the government’s next steps, argued that Xinis lacked jurisdiction over the situation.
At Monday’s hearing, Xinis pressed Molina about the government’s intentions and under which provision of U.S. law officials would pursue them. But Molina demurred, saying “no such intention has been communicated” to him.
“Why should I give the respondents the benefit of that doubt in this case?” Xinis said, noting Justice Department lawyers’ previous misrepresentations.
Xinis also took issue Monday with a recent Justice Department legal filing that asserted her restraining order this month had been issued “on an ex parte basis,” meaning one side was not notified or heard.
“Everybody signed it, and it’s flat wrong. So who did that?” Xinis said, wanting to know who authored the brief while visibly furious. “There’s like four lawyers that signed this. I want to know who.”
Molina did not answer her question, but conceded the claim was incorrect.
“Let’s be real clear,” Xinis told him. “In the future — I’ll say it again — be really careful what you write.
“Make sure it’s factually accurate, because it’s getting to the point where we’re going to have a very long hearing…” Xinis said, apparently referring to a hearing on a motion made by Abrego’s lawyers in June for Xinis to sanction government officials for defying her orders.
Xinis has said that she would consider contempt findings against administration officials but that she wanted to first develop a more complete factual case record.
Before Monday’s hearing, a crowd holding signs of support cheered as Abrego entered the courthouse, holding hands with his wife and wearing a gray button-down shirt. It was his first opportunity to attend a hearing in his civil case against the Trump administration. He returned smiles from supporters as he walked into the courtroom but said nothing.
Xinis ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Abrego’s return to the United States in April after the administration illegally deported him to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador. Even after an appeals court and then the Supreme Court affirmed that order, the Trump administration stonewalled Xinis for weeks and returned Abrego only after the Justice Department obtained a criminal indictment against him on charges of human smuggling in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for trial in January.
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. He could apply for asylum or a green card through his U.S.-citizen wife, they said.
Abrego has become a symbol of President Donald Trump’s aggressive mass deportation campaign and a target of the administration’s ire. Officials have repeatedly alleged that he is a leader of the violent MS-13 transnational gang, relying on evidence that judges have found “slim” and “simply insufficient.” His lawyers argue that immigration officials’ efforts to keep him detained since his return from El Salvador this year are more about punishing him than deporting him. If the government’s goal was simply to deport him, it could already have sent him to Costa Rica, a country that has agreed to accept him and to which he would agree to go, his lawyers say.
After Abrego’s release from custody this month, Chief Border Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino on Fox News decried federal judges overseeing the case, saying they “put MS-13 gang members back out on the streets to harm Americans.”
Abrego’s lawyers in the human smuggling case have asked U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. in Tennessee for sanctions over Bovino’s remarks. Crenshaw has been skeptical of the Justice Department’s attempts in court to tie Abrego to the transnational gang, and in October he ordered Justice Department and Homeland Security officials to abide by rules that prohibit them from maligning Abrego outside the courtroom so he can receive a fair trial.
Crenshaw also recently concluded there was “some evidence the prosecution may be vindictive” and has ordered additional hearings on the matter.
Abrego came to the U.S. illegally as a teen. He has said he was fleeing death threats from the Barrio 18 gang, which 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 El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, where he and other deportees taken there with him say they were tortured.
Officials returned him in June to face the 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, his lawyers say, he turned down an offer to plead guilty to the smuggling charges and be deported to Costa Rica, a Spanish-speaking country regarded as safe. When he refused, ICE rearrested him and threatened to deport him to Uganda, then Eswatini, then Ghana, and finally to Liberia.
At a lengthy hearing last month, Xinis questioned the government’s claims that Costa Rica had gone back on its promise to accept Abrego. Trump administration lawyers said Liberia was his only option.
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.
Trump administration officials “did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote in a Dec. 11 opinion as she ordered Abrego’s release. Xinis said the misrepresentation appeared to be part of a pattern of administration officials defying her orders.
On Monday, the judge gave the Trump administration until Dec. 26 to indicate how the government plans to proceed in Abrego’s separate immigration case.
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