A federal judge in Maryland ruled Tuesday that Immigration and Customs Enforcement cannot re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national who was deported to El Salvador, brought back to the United States under court order, and then indicted on human smuggling charges in Tennessee.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis found that, because a 90-day detention period has expired and the government has presented no workable plan to remove Abrego Garcia from the country, ICE has no legal basis to hold him again. The ruling is the latest twist in a case that has become a symbol of just how broken the immigration system remains, even when the government is actively enforcing the law.
The backstory reads like a stress test for every institution involved, and every one of them failed it.
Abrego Garcia entered the United States illegally as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador, citing danger from a gang that had threatened his family. He settled in Maryland, married an American citizen, and had a child.
Then, last year, he was deported to El Salvador anyway. The government itself has characterized the deportation as a mistake, an error that sent him to the exact country a judge had ruled was too dangerous for his return. Public pressure and a separate court order compelled the Trump administration to bring him back to U.S. soil in June.
That might have been the end of the story. It wasn't, according to the New York Post.
Upon his return, Abrego Garcia was indicted and charged with human smuggling in Tennessee. He has pleaded not guilty. Meanwhile, administration officials have made clear in court filings that they do not believe he should remain in the United States.
With El Salvador off the table under the 2019 ruling, the government attempted a workaround: deport Abrego Garcia to an African country instead. In court filings, officials listed four proposed destinations:
Judge Xinis was unimpressed. She wrote that the government had "made one empty threat after another to remove him to countries in Africa with no real chance of success."
From that record, the judge reached a blunt conclusion:
"From this, the Court easily concludes that there is no 'good reason to believe' removal is likely in the reasonably foreseeable future."
The 90-day detention window, the statutory period during which the government can hold someone while arranging removal, expired without any of those African nations agreeing to accept him. Once that clock ran out, the legal ground beneath ICE's feet disappeared.
This case illustrates a maddening reality that conservatives have warned about for years. The immigration court system is a labyrinth of conflicting rulings, procedural traps, and judge-made obstacles that can render enforcement nearly impossible, even against someone facing active criminal charges.
Consider the sequence. A man enters the country illegally. A judge says he can't be sent back to his home country. He gets deported there anyway by mistake. A court forces the government to retrieve him. He gets charged with human smuggling. And now a different judge says the government can't even detain him because it couldn't find a third country willing to take him within 90 days.
At every turn, the system produced an outcome that makes enforcement harder and accountability more distant. The 2019 ruling blocked deportation to El Salvador. The erroneous deportation created the legal obligation to bring him back. The failed negotiations with four African nations burned through the detention clock. And now the judicial finding that removal is not "reasonably foreseeable" effectively ties ICE's hands.
None of this happened because the government wasn't trying. It happened because the legal architecture of immigration enforcement is designed, layer by layer, to absorb effort and produce paralysis.
Abrego Garcia still faces the human smuggling charges in Tennessee, where he has entered a not guilty plea. Trump administration officials have stated plainly that they do not believe he should remain in the country. But Judge Xinis's ruling removes one of the few tools they had to keep him in custody while pursuing that goal.
The case now sits at the intersection of criminal prosecution and immigration law, two systems that rarely cooperate smoothly. The smuggling indictment may provide a separate legal basis for detention through the criminal justice system, but that is a different proceeding with different rules.
For the administration, the lesson is not that enforcement failed because of a lack of will. The will was there. The legal framework simply absorbed it. Until Congress rewrites the rules that let cases like this spiral into absurdity, the courts will keep producing outcomes that leave illegal immigrants on American soil and the public wondering how it happened.
The system didn't break down. It worked exactly as it was built to work. That's the problem.
