Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts agreed Monday to pause a midnight deadline for the Trump administration to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
The Justice Department argued in an emergency appeal to the justices that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis overstepped her authority when she ordered Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the United States.
The administration has conceded that Abrego Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador because an immigration judge found he likely would face persecution by local gangs.
But he is no longer in U.S. custody and the government has no way to get him back, the administration argued.
Xinis gave the administration until just before midnight to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
“The district court’s injunction—which requires Abrego Garcia’s release from the custody of a foreign sovereign and return to the United States by midnight on Monday—is patently unlawful,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in court papers, casting the order as one in “a deluge of unlawful injunctions” judges have issued to slow President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The Trump administration is separately asking the Supreme Court to allow Trump to resume deportations of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members to the same Salvadoran prison under an 18th-century wartime law.
The federal appeals court in Richmond, Virginia, denied the administration’s request for a stay. “There is no question that the government screwed up here,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote in a brief opinion accompanying the unanimous denial.
Read the full report from the Associated Press.
