Chief Justice John Roberts sides with Trump, temporarily stops order to return mistakenly deported Salvadoran national

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the Trump administration on Monday and temporarily paused a lower court’s order to return a mistakenly deported man accused of being an MS-13 gang member.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland had ordered the government to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from a brutal prison for terrorists in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia was deported on March 15 on the basis that he was a threat to the public as an accused Mara Salvatrucha terror gang member.

‘That does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations.’

Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. illegally in about 2011 and had been living in Maryland with his wife, who is a U.S. citizen. He had no criminal record, according to his attorneys, and has three children, who are also U.S. citizens.

Solicitor General John Sauer argued that Xinis had exceeded the judicial branch’s power and requested a stay from the Supreme Court, according to Politico. He went on to describe the order as “unprecedented and indefensible.”

Xinis had ruled that the government “offered no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any terrorist activity” and said that he must be returned to the U.S. by 11:59 p.m. on Monday evening.

On Sunday she reiterated the order and wrote that the government “had no legal authority to arrest [Abrego Garcia], no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere.”

On Monday morning, the three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against the request from the Trump administration and found that Xinis had not overreached the authority of the judiciary.

Roberts, acting on his own, issued an “administrative stay” against the Xinis order so that the full court had time to consider the case more thoroughly.

The Trump administration has said the deportation was an “administrative error” but continues to support the accusation that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 gang member.

“While the United States concedes that removal to El Salvador was an administrative error,” Sauer wrote, “that does not license district courts to seize control over foreign relations, treat the executive branch as a subordinate diplomat, and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight.”

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