The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Monday to block a trial judge’s order directing the United States to return a Salvadoran migrant it had inadvertently deported.
Judge Paula Xinis of the Federal District Court in Maryland had said the administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by sending the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to a notorious prison last month. She ordered the government to return him by 11:59 p.m. on Monday.
In the administration’s emergency application, D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, said Judge Xinis had exceeded her authority by engaging in “district-court diplomacy,” because it would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure his release.
“If this precedent stands,” he wrote, “other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business,” he wrote. “Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”
He said it did not matter that an immigration judge had previously prohibited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador.
“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Mr. Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”
The administration contends that Mr. Abrego Garcia, 29, is a member of a violent transnational street gang, MS-13, which officials recently designated as a terrorist organization.
Judge Xinis said those claims were being based on “a singular unsubstantiated allegation.”
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” she wrote, “and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York — a place he has never lived.”
Just before the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to weigh in, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously rejected the department’s attempt to pause Judge Xinis’ s ruling.
In a sharply worded order, the panel likened Mr. Abrego Garcia’s inadvertent deportation to an act of official kidnapping.
“The United States government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the order said. “The government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”
Mr. Sauer said Judge Xinis’s order was one in a series of rulings from courts exceeding their constitutional authority.
“It is the latest in a litany of injunctions or temporary restraining orders from the same handful of district courts that demand immediate or near-immediate compliance, on absurdly short deadlines,” he wrote.
In a separate emergency application, the administration has asked the justices to weigh in on its effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport Venezuelan migrants to the prison in El Salvador. The court has not yet acted on that application.
In filings to the court, the administration claimed that the migrants are members of Tren de Aragua, a violent street gang rooted in Venezuela, and that their removals are allowed under the act, which grants the president authority to detain or deport citizens of enemy nations.
The president may invoke the law in times of “declared war” or when a foreign government invades the United States. On March 14, President Trump signed a proclamation that targeted members of Tren de Aragua, claiming that there was an “invasion” and a “predatory incursion” underway as he invoked the wartime law.
In the proclamation, Mr. Trump claimed that the gang was “undertaking hostile actions” against the United States “at the direction, clandestine or otherwise,” of the Venezuelan government.
Alan Feuer and Abbie VanSickle contributed reporting.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002. More about Adam Liptak
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