(MARYLAND, UNITED STATES) A federal judge in MARYLAND on Thursday blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from re-detaining Kilmar Armando Ábrego García just hours after he walked out of immigration custody, a rapid-fire legal move that underscored the court’s growing alarm over what it has repeatedly described as unlawful government conduct in his case.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, acted after ICE signaled it intended to take Ábrego García back into custody following his court-ordered release, prompting an emergency response in her courtroom. Xinis barred the government from re-detaining him right before he was scheduled to appear before immigration authorities, effectively preventing ICE from arresting him again as he complied with required appearances.
The ruling came the same day Xinis ordered Ábrego García’s “immediate release” from immigration custody by 5 p.m. ET Thursday, finding ICE had been unlawfully holding him. Democracy Docket reported: “A federal judge has ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia…” and later updated: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been released from ICE custody and detention according to his attorney.”
The two-step sequence—first a release order, then a block on re-detention—caps months of whiplash for Ábrego García and his family in Maryland. A Salvadoran national, he has lived in the state with his U.S. citizen wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and their U.S. citizen children. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him withholding of removal, a legal protection that stops the U.S. government from sending a person back to a country where they are likely to face harm. The immigration judge in his case found a “clear probability of future persecution” if he were returned to El Salvador.
Despite that protection, the Trump administration deported Ábrego García on March 15, 2025 to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). The administration later called his deportation “an administrative error,” a characterization that did little to ease the outrage of his family or the legal scrutiny that followed.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura sued in Maryland, bringing the case to Xinis, who ordered the government to “facilitate and effectuate” her husband’s return to the United States. The case then reached the Supreme Court, which on April 10, 2025 unanimously held that the government must “facilitate” his return and acknowledged that his removal to El Salvador was illegal.
Ábrego García was returned to the United States on June 6, 2025, but his legal trouble did not end at the airport. The Department of Justice announced he had been indicted in Tennessee for “conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain” and “unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain,” and he was jailed in Tennessee. He was later released on bail and returned to Maryland.
Even after that return, ICE detained him again, holding him in immigration custody for months. The government’s stated plan was not simply to keep him in detention while his case proceeded, but to pursue a new deportation effort—seeking removal to a third country rather than El Salvador, where a withholding-of-removal order barred his return.
Xinis’s order demanding Ábrego García’s release and her follow-up block on ICE re-detaining him landed against the backdrop of her earlier, unusually sharp descriptions of the government’s conduct. In prior rulings, she described his original deportation as “wholly lawless” and said it “shocks the conscience,” writing:
“Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of [immigration law].”
Those words—“wholly lawless” and “shocks the conscience”—have become touchstones in the Maryland litigation, cited by supporters as proof the government crossed legal and moral lines and by immigration lawyers as a rare instance of a federal judge openly condemning the mechanics of detention and deportation in real time. For Ábrego García’s family, the language mirrors what they say they have lived through: abrupt disappearances, shifting custody decisions across state lines, and the fear that compliance with government appointments could become a trapdoor back into detention.
The judge’s latest intervention was aimed at stopping precisely that scenario. After Ábrego García was released, ICE signaled it intended to re-detain him—moving swiftly enough that the threat arose before he was scheduled to appear before immigration authorities. The emergency motion in Xinis’s court sought to prevent a cycle in which a person is freed by a federal judge, then arrested again while attempting to follow the rules that immigration supervision demands.
The dispute highlights the complicated overlap between different arms of the U.S. government—criminal prosecutions, immigration detention, and civil court orders. In Ábrego García’s case, that overlap has played out across multiple states, from Maryland, where he has lived with his family, to Tennessee, where the Justice Department brought the indictment and held him in jail after returning him to the United States.
It has also played out across multiple legal labels. Withholding of removal, the protection he received in 2019, does not grant permanent legal status, but it is supposed to bar the government from sending someone to a country where they would likely be persecuted. The case has raised the question of what it means to “facilitate” a person’s return after an illegal removal—and what limits, if any, restrain the government once that person is back on U.S. soil but still within the immigration system.
The government has also publicly accused Ábrego García of being an MS‑13 member, an allegation tied to an old immigration bond proceeding and contested by his family. Jennifer Vasquez Sura, identified in court filings as his U.S. citizen wife, said the government had “absolutely no evidence” and that “Kilmar is not and has never been a gang member.” The Washington Post reported that no court has ever made a “full adjudication” that he is a gang member.
His lawyers, seeking to amend their complaint in a July 2 filing, also alleged a grim account of what happened to him in El Salvador after the March deportation. At CECOT, they said, he was subjected to “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.” They also stated that prison staff separated prisoners with gang tattoos from those without and placed him among prisoners without gang tattoos, contradicting the government’s public claims that he was a gang member.
CECOT, a centerpiece of El Salvador’s mass-incarceration approach, has drawn intense scrutiny from rights advocates over conditions and due process. In Ábrego García’s Maryland case, allegations about the facility have become more than background—they are part of the argument that the United States sent a man into danger in open defiance of an immigration court’s earlier finding that he faced a “clear probability of future persecution” if returned to El Salvador.
The administration’s description of his deportation as “an administrative error” sits uneasily with those allegations and with Xinis’s finding that he was seized “without any lawful authority,” held in “three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis,” and removed “in direct contravention of [immigration law].” For immigration lawyers watching the case, the dispute has become a test of whether courts can effectively enforce limits on detention and deportation when the government moves quickly and across jurisdictions.
In practical terms, Xinis’s order means Ábrego García is to remain free in Maryland while his case proceeds, without the immediate threat that ICE can simply take him back into custody at the next required check-in. His longer-term status remains uncertain, however, with the government having previously intended to pursue deportation to a third country and having pursued criminal charges in Tennessee.
For his family, the immediate stakes are more basic: whether he can stay at home without being hauled away again. His U.S. citizen children, and Jennifer Vasquez Sura, have watched him disappear into detention more than once, including his removal to El Salvador on March 15, 2025 and his later months in immigration custody after returning to the United States. The whiplash has been amplified by the court’s own timeline—an order to return him, a Supreme Court decision requiring the government to “facilitate” that return, a Justice Department indictment upon his arrival back in the country, and then renewed immigration detention after he made it home.
Xinis’s decisions also land at a moment when immigration enforcement tactics are under fresh scrutiny nationally, with federal courts increasingly asked to referee disputes over detention authority and compliance with court-ordered protections. While the Maryland case centers on one man, it touches questions with broader consequences: what remedies exist when the government violates an immigration judge’s protective order, and whether deportation can be undone in a meaningful way once a person has been transported to a foreign prison.
ICE did not release a statement in the source material, but the agency’s intention to re-detain Ábrego García triggered the emergency legal response that led to Xinis’s order. The case is being litigated in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, where the judge has shown little patience for what she views as government attempts to sidestep legal constraints.
For readers tracking the mechanics of U.S. immigration enforcement, the agency involved is U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles immigration detention and removals. ICE’s public information is available through its official site at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement website.
What happens next for Kilmar Armando Ábrego García will depend on how the government proceeds in both immigration and criminal arenas, and how firmly the federal court in Maryland continues to police its own orders. For now, after a day that saw him freed from immigration custody and then protected from being swiftly locked up again, the judge’s message was clear: Ábrego García is to remain out of detention while his case moves forward, and the government is not free to turn a court-ordered release into a brief intermission before another arrest.
Judge Paula Xinis ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Ábrego García and barred ICE from re-detaining him after finding prior detention unlawful. Ábrego García was deported to El Salvador’s CECOT in March 2025 despite a 2019 withholding-of-removal order; the Supreme Court later required the government to facilitate his return, which occurred June 6, 2025. The case raises conflicts between criminal prosecutions, immigration enforcement, and courts policing government actions.
