The Supreme Court today issued a brief order today which partly sides with a lower court’s order that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of an illegal immigrant living in Maryland who was deported to a prison in El Salvador last month. However there are some quibbles about the wording of the lower court’s order and also about the timing.
We’ll get to those issues in a moment but first, here’s the backstory of this one which is important for making sense of the case.
On March 15, 2025, the United States removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to El Salvador, where he is currently detained in the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT). The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal….
