Chief Justice John Roberts put a temporary stay on a lower-court order requiring the Trump administration to return a wrongfully deported Salvadorian immigrant to the U.S. by midnight Monday.
Roberts’ stay came hours after a three-judge panel for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the Trump administration’s request to overturn the lower-court order.
The Supreme Court’s administrative stay gives justices additional time to rule on the dispute.
“The United States 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,” the court ruled. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”
President Donald Trump last month invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), an 18th century wartime law, to deport the man, Kilmer Abrego Garcia, and hundreds of other people to a hard labor prison in El Salvador.
The U.S. government claimed those deported were members of Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization based in Venezuela. However, it didn’t give them the chance to challenge their designation, nor did it publicly provide evidence they are members of the gang.
Officials said in court filings last week that the Trump administration made an “administrative error” by deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. An immigration judge had previously determined that he should not be sent to his home country because he could be persecuted and tortured by gangs that extorted his family.
Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident working as a sheet metal apprentice, has a wife and five-year-old child who are both U.S. citizens. He has never even been charged with a crime in the U.S., El Salvador or any other country.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested him on March 12. The Trump administration has repeatedly alleged, without showing proof either in public or in the courts, that he has ties to the MS-13 gang.
A federal judge ordered the government last week to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by midnight Monday. The Trump administration mocked the court’s order, claiming it couldn’t return him and that the judge had no authority to order his return. It asked the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the ruling.
The federal appeals panel said it denied the Trump administration’s order in part because its actions have “most assuredly violated the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”
“The Government can — and does — return wrongfully removed migrants as a matter of course,” the court said. “Requiring the Government to do so here is nothing less than exercising our duty to uphold the separation of powers.”
Before the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling Monday, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court. In the government’s application to SCOTUS, Solicitor General Dean Sauer claimed that the U.S. should not have to return Abrego Garcia because he’s “a verified member of MS-13.”
The 4th U.S. Circuit panel noted that the Department of Justice presented no evidence that Abrego Garcia was a member of the gang. It also noted that Abrego Garcia was accused of being a member of the gang’s arm in New York — where he has never lived.
“There is no question that the government screwed up here,” Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, wrote. “The withholding of removal order was country specific; it banned the government from removing Abrego Garcia to El Salvador and El Salvador only.”
Wilkinson said granting the Trump administration’s request would create a loophole through which it 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.”
“It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone,” Wilkinson said.
Over the weekend, Trump endorsed sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador prisons.