A federal judge on Wednesday ordered Maryland immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be released from the Tennessee prison where he has been held since his return from a wrongful deportation to El Salvador.
At the same time, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw stipulated that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are not permitted to arrest him as soon as he is released.
Instead, if the Trump administration wishes to deport him to another country aside from El Salvador — which they have expressed interest in doing — they must give his attorneys three business days’ notice in order to prepare their defense.
The El Salvadoran native was swept up in President Donald Trump’s deportation flights to the country’s brutal CECOT prison back in March, violating a court order specifically preventing him from being sent back to El Salvador out of fear of persecution.
The Justice Department eventually admitted that the deportation was made in error and facilitated his return to the United States, but new federal smuggling charges were promptly lodged against him, resulting in his detention. Prosecutors claim that Abrego Garcia transported undocumented migrants across state lines.
Crenshaw said that Abrego Garcia’s release is consistent with the Supreme Court’s mandate that “his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”
Abrego Garcia asserted that he was tortured in the country’s notorious CECOT prison, forced to kneel for nine hours per day and beaten if they fell from exhaustion.
The judge said the 72-hour notice “is necessary to prevent a repeat of Abrego Garcia’s unlawful deportation to El Salvador by way of third-country removal.”
“Defendants have taken no concrete steps to ensure that any prospective third country would not summarily return Abrego Garcia to El Salvador in an end-run around the very withholding order that offers him uncontroverted protection,” the judge said, noting that a third-party country had done just that in at least one other case.
Crenshaw also expressed frustration with an ICE official who testified at a hearing in the case, Thomas Giles, the agency’s assistant director of removal operations. Giles appeared “ill-prepared to discuss Abrego Garcia’s immigration case,” the judge wrote.
He also pointed out the absurdity of the government’s assertion during the hearings that they needed “additional information” from Abrego Garcia before they decided whether to send him to another country, and which one.
“Defendants maintained this position despite having spent months investigating nearly every aspect of Abrego Garcia’s life. Now, counsel’s proffers seem patently incredible,” Crenshaw wrote.