Judge blocks ICE from re-detaining Abrego Garcia – but signals ruling could come fast

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Monday extended a temporary restraining order blocking the Trump administration from immediately re-detaining Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, after the government again failed to produce a final removal order.

Xinis agreed to keep in place the TRO she issued earlier this month, which ordered Abrego Garcia released from ICE custody, and blocked immigration authorities from immediately re-detaining him.

The extension rested on the court’s earlier determination that ICE had not obtained a final court order needed to remove Abrego Garcia from the U.S. Without that removal order, Xinis said, Abrego Garcia could not remain detained in immigration custody.

Ultimately, Monday’s hearing ended with little in the way of new information for the court in the way of that document, or any other details sought by the court.

Instead, the proceedings were punctuated only by moments of frustration from Xinis – the judge who has presided over Abrego Garcia’s civil case since March – as she tried and failed to ascertain the status of the same deportation order she cited as the basis for his release from ICE custody 10 days earlier.

“I don’t know what the government’s position is,” Xinis said Monday, exasperated. 

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Xinis ultimately adjourned court with a vow to work “as quickly” as possible to issue a ruling. 

She set a deadline of Friday – one day after Christmas – for the Justice Department to submit additional information on its removal plans, including the deportation document and third country of removal.

She also ordered additional information from the plaintiffs, due by the end of the month. 

Lawyers for Abrego reiterated on Monday that his preferred country of removal is Costa Rica, which had agreed to accept him in August.

Xinis noted that the government told her in court last month that Costa Rica had rescinded its offer to accept Abrego Garcia; a subsequent declaration submitted by a government official for the country clarified that it had not.

She used her earlier order to excoriate what she described as the government’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 reiterated these concerns Monday. 

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She said that without the extension of the TRO, she feared that the Trump administration would seek to illegally detain Abrego Garcia “in the middle of the night” and without due process.

“I am trying to get to the bottom of whether there are going to be any removal proceedings,” Xinis told the Justice Department lawyers on Monday. “You haven’t told me what you’re going to do next.”

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Xinis used a separate memo opinion earlier this month to tick through, in extemporaneous detail, the court’s unsuccessful, five-month effort to obtain information from the Trump administration about ICE’s plans to deport Abrego Garcia to the four African countries it had identified for his removal – Uganda, Ghana, Eswatini, and Liberia.

At times on Monday, Xinis struggled to keep her incredulity at bay. “I’m again making a finding that these representations, which are misrepresentations – are in bad faith,” Xinis told the government lawyers. 

The hearing was fairly short, and notable if only for the fact that Abrego Garcia, newly released from ICE custody, attended in person. 

He addressed a large crowd outside the courthouse after the hearing adjourned.

Abrego Garcia’s status has been at the center of a legal and political maelstrom since March, when he was deported to his home country of El Salvador, in violation of a 2019 court order and in what Trump officials acknowledge was an “administrative error.”