BALTIMORE (AP) — A federal judge blocked U.S. immigration authorities on Friday from re-detaining Kilmar Abrego Garcia, saying she feared they might take him into custody again just hours after she had ordered his release from a detention center.
The order came as Abrego Garcia appeared at a scheduled appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office roughly 14 hours after he walked out of immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania.
His lawyers had sent an urgent request to the judge, warning that ICE officials could immediately place him back into custody. Instead, Abrego Garcia exited the building after a short appointment, emerging to cheers from supporters who had gathered outside.
Speaking briefly to the crowd, he urged others to “stand tall” against what he described as injustices carried out by the government.
Abrego Garcia became a flashpoint of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown earlier this year when he was wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. He was last taken into custody in August during a similar check-in.
Officials cannot re-detain him until the court conducts a hearing on the motion for the temporary restraining order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland said. She wrote that Abrego Garcia is likely to succeed on the merits of any further request for relief from ICE detention.
“For the public to have any faith in the orderly administration of justice, the Court’s narrowly crafted remedy cannot be so quickly and easily upended without further briefing and consideration,” she wrote.
Abrego Garcia on Friday stopped at a news conference outside the building, escorted by a group of supporters chanting “We are all Kilmar!”
Abrego Garcia says he has ‘so much hope’
“I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high,” Abrego Garcia said through a translator. “I come here today with so much hope and I thank God who has been with me since the start with my family.”
He urged people to keep fighting.
After Abrego Garcia spoke, he went through security at the field office, escorted by supporters.
When Abrego Garcia’s attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, announced to the crowd assembled outside that his client would walk back out the field office’s doors again, he stressed that the legal fight was not over.
“Yesterday’s order from Judge Xinis and now the temporary restraining order this morning represent a victory of law over power,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
The agency freed him just before 5 p.m. on Thursday in response to a ruling from Xinis, who wrote federal authorities detained him after his return to the United States without any legal basis.
Mistakenly deported and then returned
Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran citizen with an American wife and child who has lived in Maryland for years. He immigrated to the U.S. illegally as a teenager to join his brother, who had become a U.S. citizen. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, where he faces danger from a gang that targeted his family.
While he was allowed to live and work in the U.S. under ICE supervision, he was not given residency status. Earlier this year, he was mistakenly deported and held in a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison despite having no criminal record.
Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, President Donald Trump’s Republican administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked a federal judge there to dismiss them.
A lawsuit to block removal from the US
The 2019 settlement found he had a “well founded fear” of danger in El Salvador if he was deported there. So instead ICE has been seeking to deport him to a series of African countries. Abrego Garcia has sued, claiming the Trump administration is illegally using the removal process to punish him for the public embarrassment caused by his deportation.
In her order releasing Abrego Garcia, Xinis wrote that federal authorities “did not just stonewall” the court, “They affirmatively misled the tribunal.” Xinis also rejected the government’s argument that she lacked jurisdiction to intervene on a final removal order for Abrego Garcia, because she found no final order had been filed.
ICE freed Abrego Garcia from Moshannon Valley Processing Center, about 115 miles (185 kilometers) northeast of Pittsburgh, on Thursday just before the deadline Xinis gave the government to provide an update on Abrego Garcia's release.
He returned home to Maryland a few hours later.
Immigration check-in
Check-ins are how ICE keeps track of some people who are released by the government to pursue asylum or other immigration cases as they make their way through a backlogged court system. The appointments were once routine but many people have been detained at their check-ins since the start of Trump's second term.
The Department of Homeland Security sharply criticized Xinis' order and vowed to appeal, calling the ruling “naked judicial activism” by a judge appointed during the Obama administration.
“This order lacks any valid legal basis, and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts,” said Tricia McLaughlin, the department’s assistant secretary.
Sandoval-Moshenberg said the judge made it clear that the government can’t detain someone indefinitely without legal authority.
Abrego Garcia has also applied for asylum in the U.S. in immigration court.
Charges in Tennessee
Abrego Garcia was hit with human smuggling and conspiracy to commit human smuggling charges when the U.S. government brought him back from El Salvador. Prosecutors alleged he accepted money to transport within the United States people who were in the country illegally.
The charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee for speeding. Body camera footage from a Tennessee Highway Patrol officer shows a calm exchange with Abrego Garcia. There were nine passengers in the car, and the officers discussed among themselves their suspicions of smuggling. However, Abrego Garcia was eventually allowed to continue driving with only a warning.
A Department of Homeland Security agent testified at an earlier hearing that he did not begin investigating the traffic stop until after the U.S. Supreme Court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring back Abrego Garcia.
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Associated Press writer Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
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