Just hours before a midnight deadline Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts gave the Trump administration a reprieve from having to immediately bring back to the U.S. a man who was illegally deported to El Salvador last month.

Roberts acted shortly after the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal of a district judge’s directive that U.S. officials return Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

The administration deported Abrego Garcia despite an immigration judge’s 2019 ruling that he not be sent to his home country of El Salvador because he would likely face persecution there.

Roberts issued a terse administrative order indefinitely lifting the deadline of 11:59 EDT to return Abrego Garcia set by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. The Trump administration had said that deadline was “impossible” to meet.

The chief justice’s order is not a ruling on the underlying legal issues in the case. It is likely to remain in place while the Supreme Court decides what steps to take next.

The government has acknowledged that the deportation of Abrego Garcia was an “error” that violated the 2019 immigration ruling. But the administration argues that courts have no authority to order him returned to the United States now that he has been turned over to the government of El Salvador, where he is being held in a notorious mega-prison for gang members.

In a brief filed earlier Monday, Solicitor General John Sauer asked the justices to block Xinis’ order, which he called “unprecedented and indefensible.”

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys urged the Supreme Court to leave Xinis’ order in place.

“He sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake,” they wrote in response to Sauer’s appeal.