Biden administration flagged deported El Salvadoran Abrego Garcia as illegal alien suspected of ‘human smuggling'

The deported El Salvadoran man at the center of an intense court battle was flagged in 2022 by the Biden administration as a "suspect alien" who was possibly involved in “human smuggling/trafficking” after a traffic stop hundreds of miles from his Maryland home, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents reviewed by Just the News.

The records don't indicate whether the Biden administration ever followed up on the concerns.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was stopped in Tennessee for driving erratically and speeding by a state trooper in late November 2022 and was found to be driving an SUV full of people coming from Texas with an expired Maryland license, according to the documents.

“Subject was observed speeding and unable to maintain its lane, and was subsequently pulled over,” one entry stated.

"Encountering officer decided not to cite the subject for driving infractions but gave him a warning citation for driving with an expired driver's license," the memo stated. Maryland is one of the states that issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens.

Human trafficking concerns

The circumstances of the stop led the trooper to believe that human trafficking was involved, according to a summary of the incident recorded in Homeland’s immigration alert system on Dec. 6, 2022.

“During the interview, subject pretended to speak less English than he was capable of and attempted to put encountering officer off-track by responding to questions with questions,” the summary stated. “When asked what relationship he had with the registered owner of the vehicle, subject replied the owner of the vehicle is his boss, and that his work is in construction.”

“There was no luggage in the vehicle, leading the encountering officer to suspect this was a human trafficking incident,” the report stated. Homeland's own system categorized the incident under the title "human smuggling/trafficking," the memos show.

The records indicate the incident was located by Homeland Security Investigations during a review of computer-aided dispatch reports generated anytime law enforcement stops a suspect. There is no record showing whether the Biden's DHS ever followed up on enforcing the matter.

The initial review determined that Abrego Garcia was a “suspect alien” and referred his matter for review to “passport control," the records show. Three weeks later on Dec. 27, 2022, Homeland updated its record to urge all personnel who encountered Abrego Garcia in the future to “escort to secondary,” a term referring to the investigative procedures used when someone suspected of wrongdoing is encountered at a port of entry or by border patrol agents.

Lawyers for Garcia did not return a call or email seeking comment. Ama Frimpong, who is serving as co-counsel for Abrego Garcia appeared on MSNBC Wednesday afternoon to say that the government should be subject to contempt proceedings.

The state trooper named in the 2022 incident and Homeland Security officials also did not return calls seeking comment.

The vehicle that Abrego Garcia was driving during the traffic stop was also flagged by HSI's Baltimore field office as a suspected human trafficking or smuggling vehicle in use by an unspecified target in a Maryland investigation, according to a separate document reviewed by Just the News.

"Vehicle is used by HSI Baltimore target in human smuggling/trafficking operation. Vehicle makes trips to southern border to pick up noncitizens," the record reads. The memo says the case agent should be notified if the vehicle is encountered.

The Biden administration’s flagging of Abrego Garcia on suspicions of human smuggling adds to a growing body of evidence that the man at the center of one of the most significant deportation cases in modern history wasn’t the peaceful, law-abiding father from Maryland, as his wife and lawyers have claimed in the news media.

On Wednesday, DHS released a court filing showing that Abrego Garcia’s wife sought a domestic violence restraining order against him a year before the traffic stop in May 2021. The details in the court filing match with information in the Maryland Judiciary Case Search system.

The document signed by a judge described allegations of a "violent encounter.” Court records show the case was eventually dismissed when the wife, identified as Jennifer Vasquez, failed to appear for the final court hearing in June 2021.

Separate records released by Attorney General Pam Bondi show Abrego Garcia admitted to authorities in 2019 when he was first detained that he entered the United States illegally and had no basis for seeking asylum and that Maryland police positively identified him as member of the MS-13 criminal gang.

Kilmer-Abrego-Garcia-Documents.pdf

Fundraising, comparisons to Nazis

Despite the claim that he assaulted her four years ago, Vasquez is now publicly defending Abrego Garcia, urging the Trump administration on Wednesday to "stop playing political games" and return her husband to Maryland. "Our family is torn apart during this scary time. Our children miss their dad so much," Vasquez said. "We will continue to fight back against these governments. We will never give up on you, Kilmar."

A "Go Fund Me" crowdsourcing campaign was reportedly set up by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), a charity that claims to provide assistance to immigrant workers. NDLON is partly funded through the left-wing ActBlue Charities, and their Facebook page displays images comparing ICE agents to Nazis capturing Jews. As of press time, the campaign has raised almost $200,000.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Wednesday told reporters that Homeland previously confirmed that Abrego Garcia was found in 2019 to be illegally in the country and detailed his original arrest that brought the suspect to the attention of immigration authorities.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member and foreign terrorist who was deported back to his home country and when [Abrego Garcia] was originally arrested, he was wearing a sweatshirt with rolls of money covering the ears, mouth and eyes of presidents on various currency denominations. This is a known MS-13 gang symbol of hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil,” Leavitt told reporters in a Wednesday press conference.

“Abrego Garcia was also arrested with two other well-known members of the vicious MS-13 gang. Two separate judges found that Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13, and that finding has never been disputed. And, just this morning it was revealed through Maryland court documents that Abrego Garcia's wife petitioned for an order of protection against him for two instances of domestic violence in May of 2021,” Leavitt continued.

Gang member or upright citizen?

In his 2019 hearing after he was arrested in a Home Depot parking lot, the judge recognized government evidence confirming that Abrego Garcia was arrested in the presence of other "ranking gang members" and that he was "confirmed to be a ranking member of the MS-13 gang by a proven and reliable source," though his wife continues to dispute these claims. On the fundraising page, she describes him as "a loving father, husband, son, brother, union construction co-worker [...] He has been wrongfully disappeared and deported, torn from his family due to a shocking administrative error by the US government."

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who is presiding over a challenge to Abrego Garcia's removal, ordered that the Trump administration had to return him by midnight on April 7. The Supreme Court took the case last week and granted an administrative stay. The court subsequently ruled that the administration should "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return to the United States, but also ruled the lower court judge may have exceeded her authority by ordering the the administration to bring Abrego Garcia home.

the official documents relating to 2019 and 2021 are easy to find

So is the fact that the lead investigator who manufactured those documents and allegations was suspended days later and is now a convicted criminal. The allegations were based on second hand hearsay and the government admitted they had nothing more.

Ivan Mendez of the Prince George’s County Police Department, was suspended and convicted in 2020 for leaking confidential police information to a sex worker in 2019.

https://newrepublic.com/article/194010/kilmar-abrego-garcia-case-trump-deported-error-another-hit

Trump’s Case Against Man Deported in “Error” Just Took Another Big Hit
Trumpworld claims Kilmar Abrego Garcia was in MS-13. But new information concerning the local cop who attested to that charge at the time raises fresh questions about it.
As Trump administration officials seek to defend their refusal to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after deporting him in “error,” one of the government’s chief justifications has been that he was a member of the MS-13 gang. One Trump official after another has lodged the charge, though Abrego Garcia denies this and the evidence for it is conspicuously thin.
This notion—that Abrego Garcia posed a major public safety threat inside the U.S.—has become Trumpworld’s primary excuse for denying him basic due process and leaving him in a maximum security prison in El Salvador known for human rights abuses. This includes apparently defying the Supreme Court’s recent order to “facilitate” his return: On Monday, when a reporter asked Trump if he’ll follow this directive, Trump snarled: “Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’”
But the administration’s case that Abrego Garcia is a gang member and violent criminal is running into more trouble.
The Maryland police officer who formally attested to Abrego Garcia’s supposed gang affiliation in 2019—when he was detained the first time—was subsequently suspended from the force for a serious transgression: giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker, The New Republic has established.
This officer—apparently a senior detective on Abrego Garcia’s case in 2019—is named Ivan Mendez, according to information provided by Abrego Garcia’s lawyer at the time, Lucia Curiel, who is also a member of his current legal team. Mendez was subsequently indicted for this offense, pleaded guilty, and received probation.
By itself, of course, this does not settle whether Abrego Garcia was ever in MS-13. But it buttresses the argument that the process designating him a gang member was shoddy and riddled with flaws from the outset. Abrego Garcia and his lawyers have argued that both local law enforcement and the Trump administration rushed to pin this gang affiliation on him based on evidence that was thin to nonexistent, and the suspension of this officer for such a serious offense makes that case more plausible.
These new details also help illuminate some of the lingering unknowns about this whole saga.
Abrego Garcia—a Salvadoran who came to the United States illegally in 2011, at the age of 16—was initially detained in Prince George’s County, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., in March 2019. County police asked him whether he was a gang member, which he denied.
Abrego Garcia was not charged with a crime, and on the basis of his undocumented status was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which moved to deport him. Abrego Garcia sought asylum, and during those proceedings, ICE claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13.
To support this claim, ICE relied on what’s known as a Gang Field Interview Sheet, supplied by the Prince George’s County police. It claimed that Abrego Garcia wore a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, that this was evidence of membership in MS-13, and that a “confidential source” had related that he was a member of the gang’s Westerns clique. But that operates in New York, where he never lived.
In the 2019 proceedings, an immigration judge ultimately granted Abrego Garcia “withholding of removal,” which barred his transfer to El Salvador on grounds that he’d face harm there. This is the status the Trump administration knowingly ignored by deporting him to that country in March, which the Supreme Court has now declared “illegal.” (The administration claims it has no obligation to return him, a case that falls apart under scrutiny.)
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers recounted some of that 2019 story in current court filings, but in them, they also added some details that raise additional questions. They claimed that at the time, his lawyer, Curiel, sought more information from the P.G. County police but was informed that the lead detective on his case had been “suspended.” The current filings don’t name the officer, and they don’t say why he was suspended.
But we can fill in the facts around some of these cryptic details.
Ivan Mendez was the officer who filled out this gang interview sheet, according to a copy of the sheet itself, which we obtained from Curiel. And Curiel tells us that repeated conversations with the P.G. County police inspector general confirmed that Mendez was a lead detective on Abrego Garcia’s case.
What’s more, it turns out that Mendez was suspended, in early April 2019, for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.” That’s according to the P.G. County police’s own announcement of his indictment, which came a year later, in June 2020. Strikingly, the information Mendez shared was related to “an on-going police investigation.”
“This is clearly not an officer that respects the rules and protocols,” Curiel told us. “If he’s willing to do that, what else is he willing to do?”
Mendez ultimately pleaded guilty to the charge and received probation, according to the office of Aisha Braveboy, the state’s attorney for Prince George’s County. The office also confirmed Mendez’s police ID number, which matches the one on the gang sheet. The P.G. County police declined comment, but the department appears to have acted on this misconduct efficaciously.
All this raises more questions about the integrity of the process by which Abrego Garcia has been deemed a gang member, even as Trump and his minions have been extraordinarily cavalier in throwing around the MS-13 smear.
Vice President JD Vance, for instance, has asserted that Abrego Garcia was a “convicted MS-13 gang member.” The basis for that is that during the 2019 litigation, Abrego Garcia was denied bail at an early stage. But as Roger Parloff details, this is a very weak evidentiary basis. Abrego Garcia was not even charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime related to gang membership, or any crime at all.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, meanwhile, has insisted that there’s a “lot of evidence” of Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 membership, and has even claimed he was involved in human trafficking. Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have also loudly echoed these charges.
But not only is the existing evidence of this criminality exceedingly thin; we’ve now learned that the officer who attested to it was suspended very soon after for serious professional misconduct, suggesting the whole process may have been even more dubious than previously known.
Abrego Garcia appeared to be settling into his life in Maryland. He is married to a U.S. citizen and has three children, including one with autism, and he’d been working as a sheet metal worker and taking classes at the University of Maryland.
But it bears stressing that even if real evidence of Abrego Garcia’s criminality were to emerge, his removal is still illegal, and he is still entitled to due process in the United States. If the administration wanted to deport him, it could have simply mounted another legal challenge to his “withholding of removal” status, or sought to deport him to a country other than El Salvador, which that status does not preclude. The administration still has the option of bringing him back and retrying him for removal through these conventional lawful channels.
Why officials refuse to do this remains unanswered. And now that further doubt has been cast on the procedures by which Abrego Garcia was designated a gang member in the first place, the whole affair looks even more sordid and indefensible.
Greg Sargent
Greg Sargent is a staff writer at The New Republic and the host of the podcast The Daily Blast. A seasoned political commentator with over two decades of experience, he was a prominent columnist and blogger at The Washington Post from 2010 to 2023 and has worked at Talking Points Memo, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Greg is also the author of the critically acclaimed book An Uncivil War: Taking Back Our Democracy in an Age of Disinformation and Thunderdome Politics.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/another-disgraced-cop-linked-trump-232810841.html

Another disgraced cop linked to Trump’s authoritarian deportations to El Salvador exposed: report
Christopher Wiggins
Tue, April 15, 2025 at 6:28 PM CDT
A second deportation under President Donald Trump’s draconian immigration crackdown has been tied to a disgraced police officer — exposing a disturbing pattern in how the administration is removing powerless people from the United States, largely without due process.
This time, it’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia — a Maryland father of three wrongfully deported to El Salvador by the administration’s admission — whose case has drawn international scrutiny. The New Republic revealed that the local police detective who first labeled him an MS-13 gang member was later indicted for misconduct.
The Maryland officer, Ivan Mendez of the Prince George’s County Police Department, was suspended and convicted for leaking confidential police information to a sex worker in 2020. According to The New Republic, in 2019, Mendez filled out the “Gang Field Interview Sheet” that ICE later used to claim Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 — citing, among other things, that he wore a Chicago Bulls hoodie and hat. ICE also claimed a confidential informant tied him to a New York gang clique despite Abrego Garcia never living there.
An immigration judge ultimately granted Abrego Garcia “withholding of removal,” barring his deportation to El Salvador due to the risk of harm — a ruling the Trump administration knowingly ignored when it deported him in March. The U.S. Supreme Court has since ruled the deportation illegal.
The revelation comes just days after USA Today reported that a different disgraced cop in Wisconsin — former Milwaukee police sergeant Charles Cross Jr., fired for crashing his car while intoxicated — was responsible for falsely identifying gay Venezuelan asylum-seeker Andry José Hernández Romero as a gang member, leading to his deportation to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
Both men are now imprisoned inside CECOT — a sprawling penal complex widely condemned for human rights abuses — after being swept up in Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to expedite deportations without hearings.
And yet the evidence tying both men to gangs was thin at best — and in Hernández Romero’s case, based entirely on tattoos honoring his parents.
The latest revelations come amid growing outrage following Monday’s Oval Office appearance by Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele. Instead of addressing their controversial deportation pact or court orders demanding Abrego Garcia’s return, the two authoritarian leaders used the White House platform to attack transgender women in sports.
Trump openly bragged about saving transphobia for the campaign trail. Bukele mocked complying with the Supreme Court, calling the order to return Abrego Garcia “preposterous.”

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/cop-behind-ms-13-dad-164456463.html

Cop Behind MS-13 Dad Claim Was Convicted of Sex Worker Scandal
Janna Brancolini
Wed, April 16, 2025 at 11:44 AM CDT
The police detective who accused a mistakenly deported Maryland dad of being a member of the gang MS-13 was suspended days later for leaking confidential information to a woman he was paying for sex.
President Donald Trump’s administration has admitted Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to the Salvadoran mega prison CECOT because of an “administrative error” but has refused to facilitate his return. Officials have repeatedly claimed he is a member of the MS-13 gang based upon a single flimsy allegation made in a field interview report from 2019.
In Abrego Garcia’s complaint, his attorneys wrote that they were never able to cross-examine the police detective who wrote the report because he was suspended soon after he interviewed Abrego Garcia. His allegation is the only evidence the government has ever produced to support its MS-13 claim.
The complaint doesn’t say who the detective was or why he or she was suspended. But a report from The New Republic has revealed him to be a 10-year police veteran named Ivan Mendez.
Mendez was suspended on April 3, 2019 for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts,” the department announced in a press release at the time.
His name appears on the interview report, and the police inspector in Prince George County, Maryland, confirmed to The New Republic that Mendez was the lead investigator on Abrego Garcia’s case.
He had provided the woman information about an ongoing investigation and was reported by other officers, according to The Washington Post. He was later indicted, pleaded guilty and received probation for the misdemeanor offense.
Just days before his suspension, Mendez had interviewed Abrego Garcia at the Prince George County Police Department.
The El Salvador native had fled his home country in 2011 at age 16 after gang members threatened to kill him over his family’s pupusa business. He was undocumented and was hanging around a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested alongside three other day laborers.
Police questioned him about gang activity, but after he said multiple times that he didn’t have any information, they turned him over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without charging him with any crimes.
Mendez nevertheless filled out a “Gang Field Interview Sheet” and wrote that a confidential informant had identified Abrego Garcia as a member of the MS-13 Westerns clique. The Westerns operated in New York, a state Abrego Garcia had never lived in.
Four days later, on April 1, 2019, Mendez’s fellow officers reported him for leaking information to the sex worker. In the meantime, Abrego Garcia received a notice to appear at a deportation hearing since he had entered the country illegally.
During his first removal hearing on April 24, 2019, Abrego Garcia’s attorney requested bond, but ICE objected that Abrego Garcia was a danger to the community. He had been detained “in connection with a murder investigation,” and local police had “verified” he was gang member, ICE wrote on his federal “Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien” form.
In fact, he had been detained for loitering outside the Home Depot, according to the Mendez’s “Gang Field Interview Sheet.”
Based on the two documents, the judge denied bail, even though legal experts say the evidence was a form of double hearsay: a detective who hadn’t been cross-examined making an accusation based on an unidentified informant who also hasn’t been cross examined.
When Abrego Garcia’s lawyer tried to question the detective, he was told Mendez had been suspended. Nobody else from the gang unit was willing to answer questions, according to the complaint. Neither city nor county police had any incident reports that mentioned Abrego Garcia. Even the Home Depot arrest report only named the three other men who were arrested.
The attorney filed a motion for a subpoena to compel the police department’s detectives to testify and provide any evidence they had about Abrego Garcia’s alleged gang membership. But the ICE attorney said on the record there wasn’t any other evidence.
Abrego Garcia applied for asylum and was granted a “withholding of removal” order, a legal form of protection that says the government won’t deport someone to their home country if the person is “more likely than not” to face persecution there.
Despite the protective order, on Mar. 12 of this year, Abrego Garcia—who married a U.S. citizen and was working full-time as a sheet metal apprentice—had just picked up his 5-year-old son from the boy’s grandmother’s house after his shift when ICE officers pulled him over.
They said his immigration status had changed, then arrested him and called his wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura. Once she arrived to get their son, he was taken away without explanation.

Let’s be clear: he is NOT WELCOME back in the United States.

Another Circuit court panel pitches a shutout.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815/gov.uscourts.mdd.578815.88.0_5.pdf

USCA4 Appeal: 25-1404 Doc: 8 Filed: 04/17/2025
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT
No. 25-1404
(8:25-cv-00951-PX)
KILMAR ARMANDO ABREGO GARCIA; JENNIFER STEFANIA VASQUEZ SURA; A.A.V., a minor, by and through his next friend and mother, Jennifer Vasquez Sura,
Plaintiffs – Appellees,
v.
KRISTI NOEM; TODD LYONS; KENNETH GENALO; NIKITA
BAKER; PAMELA JO BONDI; MARCO RUBIO,
Defendants – Appellants.
O R D E R
WILKINSON, Circuit Judge, with whom KING and THACKER, Circuit Judges, join:
Upon review of the government’s motion, the court denies the motion for an emergency stay pending appeal and for a writ of mandamus. The relief the government is requesting is both extraordinary and premature. While we fully respect the Executive’s robust assertion of its Article II powers, we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision.
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[2]
It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.
This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.
The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove “by a preponderance of evidence” that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal). Moreover, the government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was wrongly or “mistakenly” deported. Why then should it not make what was wrong, right?
The Supreme Court’s decision remains, as always, our guidepost. That decision rightly requires the lower federal courts to give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” Noem v. Abrego Garcia, No. 24A949, slip op. at 2 (U.S. Apr. 10, 2025); see also United States v. Curtiss-Wright Exp. Corp., 299 U.S. 304, 319 (1936). That would allow sensitive diplomatic negotiations to be removed from public view. It would recognize as well that the “facilitation” of Abrego Garcia’s return leaves the Executive Branch with options in the execution to which the courts in
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[3]
accordance with the Supreme Court’s decision should extend a genuine deference. That decision struck a balance that does not permit lower courts to leave Article II by the wayside.
The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do essentially nothing. It requires the government “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2. “Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. See Abrego Garcia, supra, slip op. at 2 (“[T]he Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”). The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Cf. Loper Bright Enters. v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 400 (2024); Christensen v. Harris Cnty., 529 U.S. 576, 587 (2000). Thus, the government’s argument that all it must do is “remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia’s] return,” Mot. for Stay at 2, is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court’s command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.
“Facilitation” does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country’s prisons that the withholding order forbids and, further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. “Facilitation” does not sanction the abrogation of habeas corpus through the transfer of custody to foreign
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[4]
detention centers in the manner attempted here. Allowing all this would “facilitate” foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.
The government is obviously frustrated and displeased with the rulings of the court. Let one thing be clear. Court rulings are not above criticism. Criticism keeps us on our toes and helps us do a better job. See Cooper v. Aaron, 358 U.S. 1, 24 (1958) (Frankfurter, J., concurring) (“Criticism need not be stilled. Active obstruction or defiance is barred.”). Court rulings can overstep, and they can further intrude upon the prerogatives of other branches. Courts thus speak with the knowledge of their imperfections but also with a sense that they instill a fidelity to law that would be sorely missed in their absence. “Energy in the [E]xecutive” is much to be respected. FEDERALIST NO. 70, at 423 (1789) (Alexander Hamilton) (Clinton Rossiter ed., 1961). It can rescue government from its lassitude and recalibrate imbalances too long left unexamined. The knowledge that executive energy is a perishable quality understandably breeds impatience with the courts. Courts, in turn, are frequently attuned to caution and are often uneasy with the Executive Branch’s breakneck pace.
And the differences do not end there. The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.
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[5]
The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?∗ And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning. U.S. CONST. art. II, § 3; see also id. art. II, § 1, cl. 8.
Today, both the United States and the El Salvadoran governments disclaim any authority and/or responsibility to return Abrego Garcia. See President Trump Participates in a Bilateral Meeting with the President of El Salvador, WHITE HOUSE (Apr. 14, 2025). We are told that neither government has the power to act. The result will be to leave matters generally and Abrego Garcia specifically in an interminable limbo without recourse to law of any sort.
The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.
____________________
* See, e.g., Michelle Stoddart, ‘Homegrowns are Next’: Trump Doubles Down on Sending American ‘Criminals’ to Foreign Prisons, ABC NEWS (Apr. 14, 2025, 6:04 PM); David Rutz, Trump Open to Sending Violent American Criminals to El Salvador Prisons, FOX NEWS (Apr. 15, 2025, 11:01 AM EDT).
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[6]
It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower’s sage example. Putting his “personal opinions” aside, President Eisenhower honored his “inescapable” duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” Address by the President of the United States, Delivered from his Office at the White House 1-2 (Sept. 24, 1957); 349 U.S. 294, 301 (1955). This great man expressed his unflagging belief that “[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts.” Id. at 3. Indeed, in our late Executive’s own words, “[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result.” Id.
Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph. It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.
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[7]
In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered. For the Court
/s/ Nwamaka Anowi, Clerk

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