A federal judge has barred the Trump administration from holding Kilmar Abrego Garcia in immigration custody, converting a previous emergency order into longer-term injunctive relief and ruling that the government failed to demonstrate his continued detention was lawful.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis issued the order Tuesday, finding that the administration had provided no credible plan to remove Abrego Garcia to a third country in the "reasonably foreseeable future."
The ruling keeps the Salvadoran illegal immigrant out of ICE custody while he awaits a hearing next week in Nashville, where a separate federal judge will consider whether his criminal case should be thrown out entirely on grounds of vindictive prosecution, Fox News reported.
That's the state of play: a man living illegally in the United States, accused of domestic violence and alleged by DHS to have ties to MS-13, walking free under court protection while the federal government fights on two judicial fronts just to maintain custody of him.
Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador in March in what Trump officials acknowledged was an "administrative error" that violated a 2019 court order. Judge Xinis ordered him "immediately" returned to the United States, and by June, he was back on American soil.
He was promptly taken into federal custody in Nashville and detained on human smuggling charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop. The Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation and presented the case to a grand jury while Abrego Garcia was still sitting in a Salvadoran prison. That sequence matters. It is exactly the kind of timeline that raises questions about prosecutorial motive, and another federal judge has now said as much.
In October, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw ruled that Abrego Garcia had established a "reasonable likelihood" that his criminal case was the result of vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department. Crenshaw ordered the administration to produce internal documents and government witnesses to testify about its decision to bring the case. A motion to dismiss on those grounds is pending and will be heard next week in Nashville.
After Abrego Garcia secured release from criminal custody in August 2025, ICE re-detained him. But Judge Xinis turned her attention to a straightforward legal question: if the government was holding him for removal, where exactly did it plan to send him?
The answer, it turned out, was a rotating list of African countries with no evident willingness to accept him. Between August and December, the administration floated Liberia, Eswatini, Uganda, and briefly Ghana as potential destinations. Abrego Garcia himself identified Costa Rica as his preferred third country of removal. The government, according to Xinis, "refused to procure Abrego Garcia's immediate removal to Costa Rica."
Xinis did not mince words about what she saw. She described the government's attempts as "phantom removals" and said:
"Indeed, since Abrego Garcia secured his release from criminal custody in August 2025, respondents have made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success."
By late November, Xinis noted the government hadn't even obtained a final notice of removal order, a prerequisite for actually carrying out deportation. In December, she accused the government of stonewalling and said DOJ lawyers "affirmatively misled the tribunal." She characterized government filings as "vague, evasive, and incomplete."
Tuesday's order formalized what had been building for months. Xinis wrote:
"Respondents have done nothing to show that Abrego Garcia's continued detention in ICE custody is consistent with due process."
Abrego Garcia must remain on the stringent release conditions already imposed by ICE and in the Nashville criminal matter.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin responded to the court's earlier emergency order directly:
"This order lacks any valid legal basis, and we will continue to fight this tooth and nail in the courts."
Senior DHS and Justice Department officials have previously suggested they would appeal Xinis's orders, and Trump officials have been sharply critical of her and other federal judges, accusing them of overstepping their authority. Neither DHS nor the Justice Department responded to requests for comment on Tuesday's ruling.
The broader public narrative around Abrego Garcia has painted him as a sympathetic victim of government overreach. The facts in the record tell a more complicated story.
DHS has alleged ties between Abrego Garcia and MS-13. His attorneys have denied the gang allegations. Court records show his wife alleged multiple incidents of physical abuse in protective order filings, describing repeated domestic violence. She later withdrew the protective order request and has defended her husband publicly.
None of that changes the legal questions before the court. But it does illustrate the gap between the activist framing of this case and the actual person at its center. He was living in the United States illegally. He faces human smuggling charges. He has been accused of beating his wife. DHS says he has gang ties. His attorneys say he doesn't.
What he is not, by any honest measure, is a simple case study in government cruelty.
This case has become a microcosm of a larger dysfunction. A single illegal immigrant, deported in error, has now generated years of litigation across multiple federal courts, forced the government into a discovery process about its own internal decision-making, and produced a judicial record that includes accusations of bad faith, phantom deportation plans, and vindictive prosecution.
The original deportation was an administrative mistake. The government acknowledged that. But what followed has been a cascading series of legal entanglements that have made the situation exponentially worse. Every attempt to resolve the problem has created a new front. Every court filing has given a federal judge another opportunity to impose new constraints.
The left will frame this as proof that the immigration enforcement apparatus is fundamentally broken and cruel. That's the wrong lesson. The actual lesson is simpler and more uncomfortable for everyone involved: once a procedural error puts a case into the federal judiciary's hands, the government loses control of the timeline, the narrative, and often the outcome.
Judge Xinis has ordered expedited discovery. Judge Crenshaw has ordered internal documents produced and government witnesses to testify. The Nashville hearing is next week. The administration says it will keep fighting.
Meanwhile, Kilmar Abrego Garcia remains in the United States, out of ICE custody, under court protection, with a criminal case that may be dismissed before it ever reaches trial. One administrative error, and the system built to remove him has spent the better part of a year trying to figure out what to do with him.