Denying the Justice Department’s request to detain the deportee would be a significant rebuke of the Trump administration, which has repeatedly cast him as a dangerous criminal.
Protesters gathered on Friday outside the federal courthouse in Nashville where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was being arraigned after his return from El Salvador.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s lawyers asked the judge in the case to appoint a special master to investigate the failure by Trump officials to comply with her instructions.
The prison in Santa Ana, El Salvador, where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is believed to have been held. The White House suddenly changed course last Friday and brought him back to face indictment.
The request came as lawyers in Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s separate civil case were poised to ask a different judge to hold the Trump administration in contempt for sidestepping one of her orders.
The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, in Nashville, where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia faces criminal charges of transporting undocumented immigrants.
The court’s pause on a judge’s order came a day before the Trump administration was supposed to outline how to allow nearly 140 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador to challenge their expulsion.
Scores of Venezuelan immigrants were deported without hearings to El Salvador in March under a rarely invoked wartime law and are being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
The court’s pause on a judge’s order came a day before the Trump administration was supposed to outline how to allow nearly 140 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador to challenge their expulsion.
Scores of Venezuelan immigrants were deported without hearings to El Salvador in March under a rarely invoked wartime law and are being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s lawyers accused the Trump administration of spending months “engaged in an elaborate, all-of-government effort to defy court orders.”
Top leaders at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. are struggling to fulfill Trump campaign promises often rooted in misinformation and conspiracy theories.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I., have been tasked with making good on promises to reveal deep-state secrets — or at least show how hard they are trying.
For the nearly three months before the Justice Department secured an indictment against the man, it had repeatedly flouted a series of court orders to “facilitate” his release from El Salvador.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland and legally protected from deportation, had been held in a Salvadoran prison since March 15.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who had been living in Maryland and legally protected from deportation, had been held in a Salvadoran prison since March 15.
Much of the lawsuit sought to re-litigate legal questions that sided against the group during a lengthy pretrial period and a multiweek trial in Federal District Court in Washington.
The lawsuit is another attempt by the Jan. 6 rioters to blame the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for engaging in what the complaint called “a corrupt and politically motivated” prosecution.
The Trump administration obeyed the instructions of the judge in the case, a significant departure from the defiant stance it has staked out in other immigration matters.
A federal judge found that the Trump administration had violated an order barring officials from deporting immigrants to countries not their own without first giving them a “meaningful opportunity” to contest their removal.
The judge also said the men, expelled under the Alien Enemies Act, were likely to prevail in their claims that they had been treated unfairly, deported with no chance to contest their removals.
Administration officials have either violated orders or used an array of obfuscations and delays to prevent federal judges from deciding whether violations took place.
The entrance to the Salvadoran prison where Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is being held. The tensions between the court and the Trump administration over the case could soon come to a head.
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