The Trump administration asked the
The administration filed its request on Monday just as a federal appeals court unanimously declined to block US District Judge
The 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,” Circuit Judge
The decision is the latest hurdle for President
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The Justice Department says it no longer has any legal authority over Abrego Garcia.
“The United States does not control the sovereign nation of El Salvador, nor can it compel El Salvador to follow a federal judge’s bidding,” US Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court.
Sauer’s application went to Chief Justice
US ‘Screwed Up’
In the Abrego Garcia case, Circuit Judge
“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done,” Wilkinson wrote. “It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone.”
Thacker agreed the government “must clean up the mess it has made.”
But Wilkinson also said the case raises tensions between the executive branch improperly deporting a resident and a judge effectively ordering another nation to release one of its own citizens from its own prison. He suggested that the executive and judicial branches might work in a way that’s “more collaborative than combative.”
He said that “in this most fraught and polarized of times,” that “remains the only way that our system of constitutional governance can ever hope to work.”
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The case involving the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, was spurred by the government’s March 15 deportation of more than 200 migrants on three planes — including two carrying alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua that Trump had declared “alien enemies.” Abrego Garcia was on a third plane of migrants the US said were deported under other immigration laws.
The US first tried to deport Abrego Garcia in 2019, when a confidential informant said he was an active member of the MS-13 gang, the government said. An immigration judge initially denied him bail, ruling he was a danger to the community. The judge later said he could be deported, but not to El Salvador, because his life would be threatened.
Bulls Hat and Hoodie
He was released and was living in Maryland with his wife and young child, both US citizens, when he was arrested on March 12 by immigration officials “due to his prominent role in MS-13,” the US said. Despite the earlier bar on his removal to El Salvador, he was sent there anyway through an “administrative error,” the government conceded.
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In an opinion on Sunday, Xinis criticized Abrego Garcia’s detention, which she said “appears wholly lawless.” US officials had “no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” the judge wrote.
Xinis said the US produced “no evidence” that he was connected to the MS-13 gang or any other criminal organization.
“The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, 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,” she wrote Sunday.
Internal Strife
The case has created strife within the Justice Department. At the April 4 hearing before Xinis, she questioned Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni about what legal authority was used to arrest Abrego Garcia in March.
“I am also frustrated that I have no answers for you on a lot of these questions,” Reuveni said. He said he could only point to “the removal order from 2019 that cannot be executed as to El Salvador.” He said: “We concede he should not have been removed to El Salvador.”
The judge asked why the US can’t get Abrego Garcia back.
“When this case landed on my desk, the first thing I did was ask my clients that very question,” Reuveni said. “I’ve not received, to date, an answer that I find satisfactory.”
Xinis said she appreciated Reuveni’s candor. The next day, the lawyer was put on indefinite leave. Attorney General
The Maryland case is Abrego Garcia v. Noem,
(Updates with excerpts of circuit court opinion and further context throughout, starting in second section.)
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Peter Jeffrey
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