Judge issues temporary order to block officials from detaining Kilmar Ábrego García

A federal judge on Friday morning issued a temporary restraining order to prohibit immigration officials from detaining Kilmar Ábrego García just hours before he was scheduled to appear at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in Baltimore.

His lawyers asked the judge to block authorities from detaining him again. The judge says officials cannot re-detain him until the court conducts a hearing on the motion for the temporary restraining order.

Ábrego had been freed from an immigration detention facility in Pennsylvania early on Thursday evening not long after a federal judge in Maryland ordered his release.

On Friday morning, Paula Xinis, a US district judge in Maryland, said that Ábrego cannot be re-detained and in her ruling she wrote that he was likely to succeed in further requests of “relief” from ICE detention, citing the merits of his case.

“For the public to have any faith in the orderly administration of justice, the court’s narrowly crafted remedy cannot be so quickly and easily upended without further briefing and consideration,” the judge wrote in her restraining order.

Ábrego spoke out on Friday after the ruling, as a group of supporters chanted “We are all Kilmar.”

“I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high. I come here today with so much hope and I thank God who has been with me since the start with my family,” he said on Friday, via an interpreter.

After his release after months in US detention on Thursday, he returned to Maryland, where he has lived for many years with his US citizen wife and child after first entering the country illegally as a teenager.

His lawyer had said on Thursday that next steps were unclear but he was ready to continue fighting any additional deportation attempts on his client’s behalf.

Ábrego’s legal team had argued that the Trump administration lacked authority to keep him in custody because no final deportation order had been issued. The rulings on Thursday and early Friday mark legal wins for Ábrego. His previous wrongful deportation to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador, breaking a court order protecting him from deportation to that country, turned him into a symbol of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies.

Ábrego was deported in March to an El Salvador mega-prison and after a massive legal and political fight, in which the Trump administration said he was never coming back to the US.

However in June, Ábrego was brought back to the US – but then faced human smuggling charges in Tennessee, where he entered a not guilty plea to charges relating to transporting migrants.

Since then, the Trump administration has sought to deport him to several nations, including Ghana, Liberia, and Uganda.

After being released to his brother’s custody in Maryland while awaiting trial, he was again taken into custody by immigration officials and was detained in Pennsylvania.

In August, a judge issued an order preventing his immediate removal from the US.

The Associated Press contributed reporting.