Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily halted a judge’s midnight deadline for the Trump administration to return to the country a man mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
Roberts agreed to hold the deadline until the high court can resolve the Trump administration’s emergency request to lift the judge’s order.
The order does not address the underlying merits of the dispute and is not necessarily an indication of how the court will rule.
Abrego Garcia was one of hundreds of migrants deported to a notorious Salvadoran prison last month. The administration has accused him of being connected to MS-13 based on a report from a confidential informant, but Abrego Garcia’s family rejects that he has any gang ties.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an appointee of former President Obama who serves in Maryland, late last week set the Monday night deadline for the Trump administration to return the man to the country.
But the Justice Department insists it cannot bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States now that he is in the hands of Salvadoran authorities, writing in court filings that the lower ruling “sets the United States up for failure.”
The administration filed its emergency appeal at the Supreme Court on Monday morning, minutes before a midlevel appeals court rejected a bid to stave off the deadline.
In court filings, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said the administration’s request is “built on a series of strawmen.”
“He sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake,” his attorneys wrote to the Supreme Court.
Though Roberts’s order is a temporary win for the Trump administration, it is not necessarily an indication that the administration will prevail.
When the administration brought a request in February to block a judge’s midnight deadline to resume $2 billion in foreign aid payments, Roberts similarly delayed it until the court could issue its ruling.
Updated at 4:21 p.m. EDT
Tags Donald Trump John Roberts Obama
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