Judge Orders Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s Release From Ice Custody

A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the Trump administration’s custody, concluding that the Salvadoran man has been illegally held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for months without the legal authority to deport him.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said ICE had repeatedly failed to produce a so-called final order of removal — the legal document obtained from an immigration court required for deportation — forcing her to conclude that none exists. Without it, the Obama-appointed judge said, Abrego cannot be legally detained.

Xinis’ order represents an immediate affront to senior Trump administration officials, who once vowed Abrego would “never walk America’s streets again.”

Abrego’s impending release is the latest twist in a saga stretching back to March, when immigration officials arrested him in Maryland and deported him to a notorious prison in El Salvador, despite a 2019 court order that barred his deportation to his home country. At the time, an immigration judge concluded that he was likely to be targeted for violence by a gang in his home country.

After Abrego sued over his illegal deportation, Xinis quickly ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego’s return, a decision largely upheld by the Supreme Court. Administration officials, who publicly resisted Xinis’ command, ultimately returned Abrego in June after securing a grand jury indictment against him for human smuggling. Abrego is fighting those charges in Tennessee, where another federal judge has found a persuasive case that the indictment was brought with a vindictive motive.

Abrego’s case has become a symbol of the administration’s haphazard mass deportation rush, which has met stiff resistance in federal courts that have repeatedly described abuses, violations of due process, abhorrent conditions in immigration facilities and erroneous deportations.

Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the administration will “continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts,” calling Xinis’ order “judicial activism by an Obama appointed judge.”

Administration officials have accusedAbrego, who illegally entered the United States around 2011 as a 16-year-old, of belonging to the violent gang MS-13, a contention Abrego has denied. Judges have repeatedly questioned the slim evidence prosecutors have presented of those allegations, despite repeated claims by President Donald Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi and other senior administration officials.

Abrego has signaled that he would be willing to accept deportation to Costa Rica, a country that has indicated it would welcome him there as a refugee. But the administration has floated plans to send him to several African nations, including Eswatini, Ghana, Uganda and Liberia. Xinis cited these efforts as examples of the administration’s apparent drive to punish Abrego rather than secure his deportation.

Xinis also said it appeared the administration had misrepresented whether Costa Rica remained an option for Abrego’s deportation, saying in court that it was no longer on the table, only to be contradicted by a senior Costa Rican government official.

The administration’s “persistent refusal to acknowledge Costa Rica as a viable removal option, their threats to send Abrego Garcia to African countries that never agreed to take him, and their misrepresentation to the Court that Liberia is now the only country available to Abrego Garcia, all reflect that whatever purpose was behind his detention, it was not for the ‘basic purpose’ of timely third-country removal,” Xinis wrote.