A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to take steps to seek the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man who was deported to El Salvador last month, ruling that his removal violated a previous court settlement intended to protect young migrants with pending asylum cases.
The decision on Wednesday by the judge, Stephanie A. Gallagher, came two weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to seek the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, another migrant who was wrongfully sent to El Salvador as part of the same deportation operation.
Judge Gallagher’s ruling, which cited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, was notable for the way it suggested that errors and violations of court directives continued to plague President Trump’s aggressive plan to deport as many as 1 million people in his first year in office.
It also raised the question of how the administration would react to a second judge’s explicit instructions to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported migrant.
Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case in the same federal courthouse in Maryland, is still trying to enforce her order directing the White House to facilitate his release. But Mr. Trump has repeatedly washed his hands of the matter, claiming he is powerless to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
The second case involves the 20-year-old Venezuelan identified in court papers only as Cristian. After being convicted of drug charges in January, court papers say, he was deemed by the administration to be subject to Mr. Trump’s recent proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law.
The White House has sought to use the act, which has been employed only three times in U.S. history, as a way to summarily remove the Venezuelans — who the administration says are members of a criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua — to a prison in El Salvador.
Once Cristian fell subject to the proclamation, officials placed him on one of three charter planes that were sent to El Salvador on March 15 from a detention center in Texas. Mr. Abrego Garcia was among the more than 200 Central and South American migrants who were also on the planes.
In her order, Judge Gallagher said that Cristian should not have been deported in the first place because he was still under the legal protections of a settlement agreement that immigration lawyers and the Department of Homeland Security had reached in the waning days of the Biden administration.
Under that agreement, unaccompanied minors who arrive in the United States and claim asylum cannot be removed from the country until their cases are fully resolved.
While Judge Gallagher found that Cristian’s case had not been resolved, she appeared to recognize that her order demanding that steps be taken to secure his return might meet recalcitrance from the White House.
Her ruling, she said, “puts this case squarely into the procedural morass that has been playing out very publicly, across many levels of the federal judiciary, in Abrego Garcia.”
Three courts — including the Supreme Court and the federal appeals court that sits over both Judge Gallagher and Judge Xinis — have told the Trump administration to do what it can to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador. The courts have also instructed the White House to devise a way of giving him the due process he should have received if he had not been improperly removed from the United States.
Judge Gallagher effectively piggybacked on those rulings by ordering that something needed to be done to bring back Cristian as well. But she added her own twist to them, instructing the government to explicitly ask the Salvadoran government to return Cristian to the United States.
“Like Judge Xinis in the Abrego Garcia matter, this court will order defendants to facilitate Cristian’s return to the United States so that he can receive the process he was entitled to under the parties’ binding settlement agreement,” she wrote. “This court further orders that facilitating Cristian’s return includes, but is not limited to, defendants making a good-faith request to the government of El Salvador to release Cristian to U.S. custody for transport back to the United States.”
In separate court papers on Wednesday, Trump officials rebutted allegations that they had violated a different judge’s order in another deportation case involving the removal of at least four Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of Tren de Aragua from a U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to El Salvador.
Judge Brian E. Murphy of the Federal District Court in Boston has told the Trump administration that migrants facing deportation to a country other than theirs must be provided with at least 15 days to challenge the removal if they have reason to fear being sent to a third nation.
But the administration sent the four Venezuelan men to El Salvador from Cuba without advance notice. On Wednesday, it took the narrow position that it had not violated Judge Murphy’s instructions because his ruling covered only officials from the Department of Homeland Security, and the men had been sent from Guantánamo by officials from the Defense Department.
Matt Adams, the legal director at the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, who represents the men, called the administration’s assertion “patently absurd.”
“D.H.S. asserts they have no responsibility because the Department of Defense, not D.H.S., flew them from Guantánamo to El Salvador,” Mr. Adams said. “This ignores the obvious fact that it was D.H.S. that arranged for our class members to be shipped to Guantánamo and then directed their removal to El Salvador. It is another shameful display of defendants’ contempt for the rule of law.”
