A federal judge in Tennessee said on Wednesday that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant wrongfully deported to El Salvador, should be freed from custody in his criminal case even as a judge in Maryland issued a separate order protecting him from being hastily expelled from the country again.
The convergence of the two judicial rulings, which came within minutes of each other, meant that Mr. Abrego Garcia could soon return as a free man for now to Maryland, where he had been living with his family before his monthslong ordeal of arrest, deportation and imprisonment in El Salvador began in March.
For the past few weeks, deep uncertainty has loomed over Mr. Abrego Garcia’s future as the Justice Department signaled that it intended to begin immediate efforts to re-deport him if he were released from custody in his criminal case, which was used in early June to bring him back from his wrongful removal to El Salvador.
Prosecutors charged him in Federal District Court in Nashville with taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle illegal immigrants across the United States as a member of the violent transnational street gang MS-13.
But in his order releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who is overseeing the criminal case, cast serious doubts on what he described as the government’s “poor attempts to tie Abrego to MS-13.”
Judge Crenshaw noted in particular that there was no evidence that Mr. Abrego Garcia had any “markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation,” an assertion that directly undercut accusations that officials including President Trump have made.
The judge also pointed out that prosecutors had offered no proof supporting claims that Mr. Abrego Garcia “has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is a MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.”
Moreover, Judge Crenshaw raised questions about the veracity of the government’s star witness in the case, Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, a Texas man who ran the smuggling operation that purportedly employed Mr. Abrego Garcia.
The order by Judge Crenshaw was the second time that a federal judge had found the government’s evidence about Mr. Abrego Garcia’s ties to a gang to be lacking. Last month, a magistrate judge in Nashville, Barbara D. Holmes, made that determination in her own order saying that Mr. Abrego Garcia should be released from criminal custody.
After the decision by Judge Holmes raised the possibility that Mr. Abrego Garcia might walk free, the Justice Department made a remarkable admission. Department lawyers said that the Trump administration would continue with the criminal case only if Mr. Abrego Garcia remained behind bars as he awaited trial. If he were released, they said, the administration would most likely drop the charges altogether, immediately take him into immigration custody and begin the process of removing him from the country for a second time.
But that possibility was forestalled — at least for the moment — by the order issued in Federal District Court in Maryland by Judge Paula Xinis who has been handling Mr. Abrego Garcia’s original wrongful deportation case.
In her order, Judge Xinis barred federal immigration officials from immediately taking Mr. Abrego Garcia into custody when he is released in Tennessee. The order also restored him to the legal situation he was in before he was arrested in Maryland on March 12 and sent to El Salvador three days later.
At that point, Mr. Abrego Garcia was living freely with his wife and children, working as a sheet metal apprentice under the protection of a previous court order that expressly barred him from sent back his homeland because he had reason to believe he would be persecuted there.
In a final measure, Judge Xinis’s order required the government to begin any new removal proceedings against Mr. Abrego Garcia in Maryland. And the judge ordered the administration to provide Mr. Abrego Garcia and lawyers with a warning of at least three business days if they intended to start the process of seeking his expulsion to a country other than El Salvador.
In much the same way that Judge Crenshaw chided the Justice Department in Mr. Abrego Garcia’s criminal case, Judge Xinis criticized the department for its handling of the civil deportation case. In fact, her order was issued two weeks after she excoriated the department at a hearing in Maryland for having “destroyed” the traditional bonds of trust that courts typically afford to government lawyers.
In her order, Judge Xinis accused the Justice Department of “defiance and foot-dragging” in complying with her initial decision handed down in April to “facilitate” his release from Salvadoran custody. That recalcitrance, she pointed out, is at the heart of a request made by Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to bring sanctions against Trump officials.
Judge Xinis also rebuked the administration for the way it brought Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States after charging him in Nashville.
“Defendants returned Abrego Garcia much the same way they had removed him,” she wrote, “in secret and with no advance notice.”
Judge Xinis expressed further frustration with how lawyers for the Justice Department had refused in three separate hearings this month to give her a clear sense of what they planned to do with Mr. Abrego Garcia. Even a witness who was called at one of the hearings to give her specific information about the government’s plan, she wrote, “knew virtually nothing about Abrego Garcia beyond what he had seen in the press.”