For much of the last two months, the White House has adopted a challenging position before a series of judicial orders – including one of the Supreme Court – to take measures to guarantee the freedom of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man from Maryland deported by mistake to El Salvador in March.
But the government is also fighting another court order in another case in which officials have been asked to liberate a different, and less known migrant, who was expelled to El Salvador in the same set of flights as Abrego Garcia.
That man, a 20 -year -old Venezuelan identified in judicial documents such as Cristian, was transferred by plane to El Salvador on March 15 along with dozens of other migrants. It was one of the almost 140 deported Venezuelans without any hearing after Trump officials accused them of being members of the Callejera Train de Aragua band and considered them subject to the proclamation of President Donald Trump invoking a law of war times of the eighteenth century called Law of Foreign Enemies.
Abrego Garcia, who is a Salvadoran citizen, was deported on one of those flights despite the fact that a previous court order expressly prohibited that he was returned to his homeland. Something similar happened to Cristian: he was expelled from the United States despite the fact that it had been ruled that his expulsion violated a previous judicial agreement aimed at protecting young migrants with pending asylum cases.
Last month, Judge Stephanie Gallagher, adopting an approach similar to that of the Judge of Abrego Garcia, ordered the Trump government to “facilitate” Cristian’s return and ask the Salvadoran government to return him to US soil. But on Tuesday, Judge Gallagher agreed to suspend his own order until Thursday, to give time to the Department of Justice to appeal it.
The two cases, which are developed in the Federal District Court of Maryland, exemplify the way in which the White House has sought new and aggressive methods to expel immigrants from the United States. Cases also reflect the increasingly recalcitrant attitude that administration has adopted towards judicial orders, especially in deportation cases.
In his initial order, of April 23, Gallagher said that Cristian should not have been deported because he was protected by the protections of an agreement that the immigration lawyers and the Department of National Security had reached in the last days of the government of Joe Biden.
By virtue of that agreement, unaccompanied minors arriving in the United States and requesting asylum cannot be expelled from the country until their cases are completely resolved.
During the weekend, the Department of Justice asked Gallagher to annul that order, claiming that, if Cristian was returned to the United States, migration officials would reject their asylum application, which would annul the protections of the agreement.
Department’s lawyers explained that their asylum application would be denied because he was a terrorist. The department has not revealed what evidence to support said statement, apart from the fact that the State Department has appointed the Aragua Train as a foreign terrorist organization.
During a hearing held on Tuesday, Gallagher refused to revoke his original ruling, noting that, although the Government finally planned Cristian’s asylum application, he would have to do so in a process that would take place in the US courts.
He told the Department of Justice that the government “cannot skip until the end” and simply leave Cristian in El Salvador because he thinks it would be useless to bring him back.
Even so, Gallagher acknowledged that if Trump officials returned to Cristian and denied his asylum application, perhaps he could not remain in the United States.
“The result for Cristian may not be granted asylum,” he said. “I think who has followed the news during the last four months would not surprise him that this was the final result.”
Maryland’s cases are not the only ones in which the Department of Justice, acting on behalf of the White House, is fighting efforts to return people deported to US soil.
Last month, in a case in Massachusetts, department lawyers tried to convince a federal judge that the Administration had not breached their order that migrants have the opportunity to challenge their expulsion to a country other than their own if they have reasons to fear being sent there.
Although the lawyers admitted that four Venezuelans accused of belonging to the Aragua Train had recently been sent to El Salvador from an American military base in Cuba without having the opportunity to question their expulsion, they gave a limited explanation of the reason. The lawyers alleged that the judge’s order only covered officials of the Department of National Security, and that, technically, the men had been sent from Cuba by officials of the Department of Defense.
Next week, a federal judge from Louisiana plans to hold a hearing to determine if Trump’s officials erroneously expelled a 2 -year -old American citizen to Honduras with her mother.
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The judge, Terry Doughty, appointed by Trump, plans to examine the government’s statement that the mother requested that the girl – known only as VML – was deported with her. Family lawyers have said that the mother and father wanted VML to remain in the United States.
In another case of deportation, a federal judge from Washington set an hearing in which it will be discussed if it can order the return of all Venezuelan men who were deported with Cristian to El Salvador by virtue of the Law of Foreign Enemies.