Judge presses Trump administration on its plans for Kilmar Abrego Garcia

By Devan Cole, Angelica Franganillo Diaz, CNN

(CNN) — An apparently frustrated federal judge pressed the Trump administration Monday to share what it was going to do next in the fast-moving saga over Kilmar Abrego Garcia days after she found he was being unlawfully held in immigration custody.

During an hour-long hearing that at times grew testy, US District Judge Paula Xinis repeatedly pressed an attorney for the government about its shifting plans for Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran national whose wrongful deportation to the Central American country in March kicked off a monthslong legal battle that has come to represent the administration’s hardline approach to immigration.

Abrego Garcia was brought back to the US earlier this year to face federal criminal charges and was later held for months at an immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania. He was released on December 11 after Xinis found that the government was unlawfully detaining him in part because there was no order of removal from an immigration judge during that period.

“I’m trying to get to the bottom of whether there is going to be any removal proceedings,” Xinis said at one point. “I’m just asking you what, basically, you’re going to do.”

“I need something to say, ‘OK, they’re not going to just pick Mr. Abrego Garcia up without lawful authority,’” she added later. “He was deported without lawful authority, he was detained without lawful authority.”

The hearing before Xinis, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, was the latest clash between the judge and the Trump administration in Abrego Garcia’s unwieldy case. It underscored the murky legal position he appeared to be in when an immigration judge – just after Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia to be released from detention – issued a non-final order of removal that his attorneys said put him at risk of being taken into custody again.

But Ernesto Molina, a Justice Department attorney, struggled on Monday to tell Xinis what could happen next to the father of three. He explained that the Department of Homeland Security would have the authority to detain Abrego Garcia had she not issued an order preventing that for now, and urged her to undo that temporary ruling.

When Xinis asked Molina specifically whether a final decision had been made to re-arrest Abrego Garcia, he said he didn’t have any information to provide her on that query.

“Well then, this is no harm, no foul,” the judge said, suggesting she would simply extend her order. In the end, she directed the government to submit to her over the next few days evidence of its intent to arrest him or a notice that it wasn’t planning to do so at this time.

The hearing marked the first time Abrego Garcia appeared in the courtroom, some eight months after the judge ordered the administration to work to bring him back to the US from a mega-prison in El Salvador.

He introduced himself to the judge at the start of the hearing, but otherwise sat silently in the courtroom as his legal team urged the judge to issue a more lasting block on the government’s ability to quickly re-arrest him.

“Mr. Abrego Garcia, you almost have a baseball team representing you today – almost,” the judge quipped at one point.

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