The legal team of Kilmar Abrego García asked a judge at a hearing on Friday to order him not to eliminate him from the United States without at least 72 hours in advance if he was released on bail of the arrest in Tennessee.
On the 3 of an audience in Maryland on the government’s plans for Maryland’s resident for a long time this week, the US district judge Paula Xinis repeatedly launched the government so, according to her, it was an insufficient effort to address what will be done exactly to guarantee due process for Abrego Garcia if she has taken to ice custody after her release.
“We are asking for a 72 -hour and 72 -hour notice, so that my client can have the opportunity to run towards what is the appropriate court at that time to obtain relief before they send it to a country not yet identified and is potentially subject to torture or persecution in violation of a court order. That is all we are asking,” said Abrego García’s lawyer to the judge.
The judge did not rule from the bank, but said he would do it soon.
Abrego García, a Salvadoran native, was deported in March to the Mega Prison of El Salvador, despite a 2019 court order that except deportation to that country due to fear of persecution, after the Trump administration said he was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang, which he denies.
He was taken back to the United States last month to face charges in Tennessee of supposedly transporting undocumented migrants within the United States while living in Maryland. He declared himself innocent.
The government lawyers have said that, if Abrego García is released on bail, he could be deported again, but Abrego García’s legal team has argued that he should be transferred from Tennessee to Maryland to wait for the trial.
Photo without a date provided by House, an immigrant defense organization, in April 2025, shows Kilmar Abrego García.
House through AP
However, Judge Xinis recognized the government’s position that there is no ice detention center in Maryland.
The judge also said that restoring the status quo would mean returning Abrego Garcia to Maryland, since it was where “he was arrested in Baltimore without any evidence”, but the government argued that its elimination process began in Texas when it was put into ice custody.
“We can have a disagreement about the status quo, his honor … With respect, we do not agree, but obviously his opinion is more important,” said the lawyer of the Department of Justice.
Xinis said that he does not necessarily believe that sending Abrego García back to his family in Maryland is the “adequate total relief”, but added: “I know there is a real question in my mind: Do you get the process to start through immigration in Maryland?”
The judge also criticized the lack of detailed responses provided by ICE Thomas Giles official during his testimony on Thursday, when he was asked to explain the government’s plans for the deportation of Abrego García.
“The reality is that this has been a process. From day 1, you have taken the presumption of regularity and, in my opinion, you have destroyed it, because I cannot assume that nothing is regular in this highly irregular case,” the judge said at the beginning of Friday’s hearing when a DAJ lawyer could not produce the Burgo García detainee document he had requested Thursday on Thursday.
Subsequently, the government produced the document later at the hearing.
Declaging that Giles’s testimony “insults my intelligence,” Judge Xinis said that obtaining specific information is critical due to the extraordinary situation in which the government has already unfairly deported Abrego García once.
“So this, we are not operating on a clean board at all,” he said. “It seems that this would be the case in which you would like to put some meat on the bones of how you are going to do this legally and constitutionally.”
The DOJ lawyers said that the Government has not yet decided if Abrego García will be transferred to a third country or if the procedures will take him back to El Salvador, and that the decision will be taken by a case officer once it is under ICE’s custody.
When the government said that an ICE case officer will decide how to advance with the deportation process of Abrego García once he is in ice custody, the judge expressed doubts about the agency’s process, saying that the process of eliminating Abrego García has been “altered, all depending on the interests of the Trump administration.”
“That is clearly insufficient to tell me what is going to happen to Mr. Abrego, apart from what I would believe, which we have not thought about this thought, without conversation, without prior planning, we are just going to throw the given on Wednesday or any day he has released, if he has released the ice custody. And I am only telling you, I am not buying that,” said Judge Xinis.
When a justice department lawyer said that this is not a fair characterization of the government’s position, saying that the decision will be taken by an ICE officer as all other cases, the judge accepted the answer, but commented that he makes his argument “weaker.”
Judge Xinis also repeatedly pressed the government about what she described as an “inconsistent” policy in its process of eliminating the third country, comparing a DHS memorandum since March with an ICE email advisor sent to its officers earlier this month, the last of what described the possibility that a person was withdrawn from the United States without the opportunity to compete with the fear of torture or persecution.
A government lawyer replied that “there is no significant difference between what is established in the process of March 30, 2025 and the process of July 9”, and that in case the process of eliminating the third country takes place, Abrego García will receive a written warning and an opportunity to dispute it.
