A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration on Friday to swiftly retrieve and return to the U.S. an admittedly erroneously deported Salvadoran national by no later than midnight on Monday.

With just hours to go ahead of that deadline, however, the Supreme Court intervened with an administrative stay to block the district court's order, Reuters reported.

That temporary stay, issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, will allow the high court more time to fully consider the details of the case and the Trump administration's formal request for an order permanently blocking the lower court's demands.

Judge orders deported alleged gang member returned to U.S.

At the center of this case is a Salvadoran national named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, 29, who came to the U.S. illegally more than a decade ago and has been living and working in Maryland with a U.S. citizen wife and children.

In March, Garcia was arrested and deported along with hundreds of other criminal illegal aliens to El Salvador as an alleged MS-13 gang member, where he was immediately incarcerated in that nation's notorious maximum security prison facility for gang members and terrorists.

The problem here is that, in 2019, a federal immigration judge ruled that while Garcia was deportable, he was protected from being sent back to El Salvador because of credible fears that he would face persecution from local gangs, and he was further granted legal permission to work in the U.S.

Garcia's family filed a lawsuit, and the Trump administration went so far as to acknowledge in court that his deportation to El Salvador was an "administrative error" that shouldn't have occurred. That led U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, to insist upon Garcia's swift return to the U.S. by no later than the end of Monday.

Judge's order blocked

According to SCOTUSblog, the Trump administration appealed Judge Xinis' order to the Fourth Circuit over the weekend but saw its request for a stay denied by the appellate judges on Monday morning, which prompted an immediate emergency appeal to the Supreme Court that same day.

Later on Monday, just hours before the lower court's deadline, Chief Justice Roberts issued a one-page order that blocked Xinis' ruling for the time being.

"IT IS ORDERED that the April 4, 2025 order of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, case No. 8:25-cv-951, is hereby stayed pending further order of the undersigned or of the Court," the chief justice wrote. "It is further ordered that a response to the application be filed on or before Tuesday, April 8th, 2025, by 5 p.m. (EDT)."

The outlet noted that just moments after Roberts' order was publicly released, Garcia's attorneys filed their prepared response in opposition to the administration's motion for Judge Xinis' order to be vacated and overturned.

The administration's argument

It is unclear when the Supreme Court will consider and rule upon the motion filed on Monday by newly confirmed Solicitor General John Sauer, who argued that Judge Xinis had "ordered unprecedented relief: dictating to the United States that it must not only negotiate with a foreign country to return an enemy alien on foreign soil, but also succeed by 11:59 p.m. tonight."

Sauer suggested that Xinis' order was "remarkable" even amid the "deluge of unlawful injunctions" from other judges, in that even Garcia had not attempted to "force the United States to persuade El Salvador to release" the detainee "on a judicially mandated clock."

He further asserted that the U.S. government "cannot guarantee success in sensitive international negotiations in advance, least of all when a court imposes an absurdly compressed, mandatory deadline that vastly complicates the give-and-take of foreign-relations negotiations."

Sauer also noted that while Garcia's "removal to El Salvador was an administrative error," that mistake didn't authorize a district court judge to "seize control over foreign relations, treat the Executive Branch as a subordinate diplomat, and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America tonight."