The Trump administration must work to return a wrongly deported Maryland man, a federal appeals court said Thursday, rejecting a request to block a lower court’s order requiring his return.
The big picture: The administration is resisting court orders to return Kilmar Armando Ábrego García from a notorious Salvadorian prison, despite conceding that the legal U.S. resident was deported in an “administrative error.”
- The U.S. government has accused Ábrego García, a Salvadorian national legally living in Maryland, of being a member of the MS-13 gang. He has not been charged with gang-related crimes.
Driving the news: The unanimous ruling from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upholds U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis’ decisions outlining the next steps for Ábrego García’s return.
- “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the ruling said.
- “While we fully respect the Executive’s robust assertion of its Article II powers, we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” the order states.
Context: Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had asked the appeals court to temporarily halt enforcement of a lower court’s orders requiring Ábrego García’s return.
- The Trump administration has argued that courts don’t have the power to dictate specific steps to the executive branch — so, effectively, no one can initiate the process to return Ábrego García.
- The Supreme Court ruled last week that the U.S. must “facilitate” his release. But the Trump administration argued that simply means if El Salvador asks to send him back, the U.S. has to help.
- “‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear,” the appeals court said.
- El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said he can’t return Ábrego García to the U.S., nor will he release him within El Salvador.
Zoom in: “The federal courts do not have the authority to press-gang the President or his agents into taking any particular act of diplomacy,” the government argued in its filing to the appeals court.
- Rather, they argued, the courts only have the authority to order the executive branch to “facilitate” a return.
- “As that term has long been understood and applied, that means the Executive must remove any domestic barriers to the alien’s return; it does not, and constitutionally cannot, involve a directive to take any act upon a foreign nation,” the filing said.
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