The federal judge overseeing Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s criminal case on smuggling charges has ordered his release from jail before trial, finding that prosecutors failed to show “any evidence” that his history or arguments against him warrant ongoing detention.
That order arrived moments after another federal judge overseeing his wrongful deportation case blocked Donald Trump’s administration from immediately arresting and deporting him after he is released from jail.
But he won’t be released just yet. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia asked a magistrate judge for a 30-day pause on any order for his release so they can “evaluate options” as they brace for immigration officers to arrest and remove him a second time.
The judge granted that request Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors have sought to bring his criminal case to trial as soon as possible, brushing up against demands from immigration officials who told the courts they plan to arrest and deport him before a trial even begins. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty, and a trial is set to begin January 27, 2026.
Abrego Garcia’s high-profile wrongful removal case has been at the center of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, dovetailing with the administration’s defiance of court orders and open hostility to the judges ruling against them.
The Trump administration spent weeks insisting Abrego Garcia would never be allowed back into the country after admitting he was wrongfully deported to a Salvadoran prison in March. Yet he was abruptly flown back to the U.S. last month to face a criminal indictment in Tennessee.
In recent court hearings in two different states, lawyers for the Department of Justice said they would only move forward with his criminal prosecution if he remains in custody while awaiting trial.
On Wednesday, Tennessee District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw said the government “fails to show by a preponderance of the evidence — let alone clear and convincing evidence — that Abrego is such a danger to others or the community that such concerns cannot be mitigated by conditions of release.”
“At bottom,” the judge wrote, “the Government fails to provide any evidence that there is something in Abrego’s history, or his exhibited characteristics, that warrants detention.”
Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis, meanwhile, has blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement from immediately detaining Abrego Garcia once he is no longer in federal custody.
She also ordered ICE to give him 72 hours’ notice if officials decide to deport Abrego Garcia to a so-called “third country,” or anywhere other than his native El Salvador.
The administration has “done little to assure the Court that absent intervention, Abrego Garcia’s due process rights will be protected,” Xinis wrote.
“Defendants’ defiance and foot-dragging are, to be sure, the subject of a separate sanctions motion,” she noted in her ruling.
“Defendants returned Abrego Garcia much the same way they had removed him — in secret and with no advance notice,” she added. “Accordingly, the Court shares Plaintiffs’ ongoing concern that, absent meaningful safeguards, Defendants may once again remove Abrego Garcia from the United States without having restored him to the status quo ante and without due process.”
Abrego Garcia was 16 years old when he fled gang violence in El Salvador in 2011 and illegally entered the U.S. Now 29, he was living and working in Maryland with his wife and child, both U.S. citizens, and two children from a previous marriage, when ICE agents arrested him in March.
He was jailed inside El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center for several weeks before he was moved to a smaller jail in the country.
Government lawyers admitted in court documents that he was removed from the country due to a procedural error, and several federal judges and a unanimous Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return. A 2019 order from an immigration judge had blocked his removal to El Salvador over humanitarian concerns, and Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed the Trump administration had “illegally” defied that order.
Still, the government spent weeks battling court orders while officials publicly said he would never step foot in the United States, characterizing him as a serial abuser and criminal gang member.
Emails and text messages provided to members of Congress appear to show that administration officials and government lawyers were sympathetic to his wrongful removal and made efforts to get him out of El Salvador before the case made headlines, causing major headaches for the White House.
A two-count indictment in Tennessee accuses Abrego Garcia of participating in a years-long conspiracy to illegally move undocumented immigrants from Texas to other parts of the country. He faces one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and one count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens.
But in their request to keep him in jail before trial, federal prosecutors also claim he is a member of transnational gang MS-13 and “personally participated in violent crime, including murder.”
Prosecutors also claim he “abused” women and trafficked children, firearms and narcotic, and there is also an ongoing investigation into “solicitation of child pornography.”
Abrego Garcia is not facing any charges on those allegations, and Judge Crenshaw argues that the government failed to link those allegations to evidence that implicates Abrego Garcia.
The judge also said that to buy the government’s argument that he is a member of MS-13, he would “have to make so many inferences from the Government’s proffered evidence in its favor that such conclusion would border on fanciful.”
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