A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to deport alleged MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda.
US District Judge Paula Xinis, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, paused the deportation plan until the Trump administration allows Abrego Garcia the opportunity to contest his removal, according to the Washington Post.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Abrego Garcia just hours before the order came down at the agency’s office in Maryland — following his release from a Tennessee jail last week after facing human smuggling charges.
“Today, ICE law enforcement arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia and are processing him for deportation,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said.
“President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer.”
Xinis’ decision follows the Salvadoran citizen’s lawsuit requesting an order to halt his deportation unless he gets the chance to contest it, his lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said.
“I expect there’s going to be a status conference very promptly, and we’re going to ask for an interim order that he not be deported, pending his due process rights to contest deportation to any particular country,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
The Trump administration shipped Abrego Garcia off to his native El Salvador in June with 260 other reputed gang members after President Trump invoked the use of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, which allowed the feds to deport them rapidly without a hearing.
But his deportation at the time was done despite an “administrative error.”
Abrego Garcia — who illegally crossed into the US in 2011 — was also offered deportation to Costa Rica if he admitted to transporting illegal migrants in the US stemming from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where he was pulled over on a highway with eight passengers in the car that contained no luggage, his lawyers argued in court documents.
“They’re holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick,” Sandoval-Moshenberg, said outside the ICE field office in downtown Baltimore.
“They’re weaponizing the immigration system in a way that’s completely unconstitutional.”
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