Abrego Garcia Freed From Immigration Detention After Court Ruling
Man mistakenly deported to El Salvador, then brought back to face criminal charges, granted release in U.S. for now
Updated Dec. 11, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was released from immigration custody after a federal judge ruled that the government couldn’t continue to indefinitely hold the man whose case has become a focal point in the debate over the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
The 30-year-old Salvadoran was released Thursday just before 5 p.m., his lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said, and was on his way to his family in Maryland.
His release follows a decision from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordering Abrego Garcia to be freed from a Pennsylvania facility where he has been held for weeks and allowed to go home to his family while the battle over his fate continues. He will be subject to home detention with electronic monitoring, she said, and can’t travel outside a handful of locations in the U.S. without permission from a court.
Xinis cited a 2001 Supreme Court decision that immigrants can’t be indefinitely detained unless there are plans to imminently deport them.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin called the order “naked judicial activism by an Obama appointed judge” and said the administration would continue to fight it “tooth and nail in the courts.”
The ruling marks the latest development in the legal saga of Abrego Garcia, which began in March when he was sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador, in contravention of a court order barring him from being deported to his home country.
After months of political and legal wrangling, Abrego Garcia was abruptly brought back to the U.S. to face newly raised human-trafficking charges, and initially jailed in Tennessee. Another federal judge ordered him released on bail, but he was then quickly taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
His trial on the human-trafficking charges, which he denies, is scheduled for January. The presiding judge has said the timeline of the case “suggests that Abrego’s prosecution may stem from retaliation” by the Trump administration.
Top administration officials have vowed that Abrego Garcia will never again live freely in the U.S., and said they wanted to see him sent to another country that has agreed to accept deportees, naming Uganda, Eswatini and Ghana, before settling on Liberia.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said those were threats to pressure him to plead guilty to the criminal charges, which he denies. They also said he was willing to be removed to Costa Rica, which had offered him residence and assurances that he wouldn’t be forcibly repatriated from there.
Xinis, who has been presiding over two civil cases brought by Abrego Garcia and his family in federal court in Greenbelt, Md., issued her order after a series of hearings in which she repeatedly pressed government lawyers to explain why the Trump administration was unwilling to let him go to Costa Rica, “the one place he will go and the one place that says it will take him.”
On Thursday she again criticized “respondents’ persistent refusal to acknowledge Costa Rica as a viable removal option,” and said that no final order of removal for Abrego Garcia existed. “Thus, Abrego Garcia’s detention for the stated purpose of third-country removal cannot continue,” she wrote.
The fight over Abrego Garcia has touched on some of the biggest flashpoints in the Trump administration’s immigration agenda to date, including the due process afforded to migrants, the administration’s deal with El Salvador to send alleged gang members to the controversial maximum-security Terrorism Confinement Center and agreements with African countries to take deportees who can’t be sent to their countries of origin.
Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com and Mariah Timms at mariah.timms@wsj.com
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Appeared in the December 12, 2025, print edition as 'U.S. Must Release Salvadoran Detainee Freed From Immigration Detention'.