On Friday, a federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to retrieve an illegal migrant erroneously deported to El Salvador and return him to the U.S. no later than midnight on Monday.

Just hours before that Monday deadline, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts intervened to temporarily block the lower court's order at the Trump administration's request, the Daily Wire reported.

The order means that, at least for now, the administration does not have to hurriedly negotiate with the Salvadoran government for the swift release and return of Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported last month despite a 2019 court order dictating otherwise, and who has been imprisoned in El Salvador's maximum security facility as a suspected MS-13 gang member.

District judge ordered the immediate return of Garcia

In March, hundreds of criminal illegal aliens and alleged foreign gang members were deported to El Salvador to be imprisoned, and Maryland resident Garcia, 29, was inadvertently included in that number because of an admitted "administrative error."

Salvadoran national Garcia had illegally entered the U.S. more than a decade ago and, in 2019, was spared from deportation to his home country by a federal immigration judge over concerns that he might face persecution.

As such, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, demanded on Friday that the Trump administration immediately retrieve and return Garcia to the U.S. by no later than the end of Monday.

Roberts puts the lower court's order on pause

According to SCOTUSblog, the administration appealed the lower court's ruling to the Fourth Circuit Court but a three-judge panel unanimously upheld the decision and declared Monday morning, "The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process."

The matter was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court on an emergency basis, and just hours before the deadline by which Garcia was to be returned, Chief Justice Roberts imposed a temporary stay to block the district court's order.

"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," Roberts wrote in the one-page order. "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 Garcia's attorneys wasted no time filing what was likely a pre-emptively prepared response just moments after Roberts' order was released.

The administration's request for a stay

Per SCOTUSblog, newly confirmed U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court in a Monday morning brief requesting a temporary stay 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 asserted that Xinis' order was "remarkable" and stood apart from the "deluge of unlawful injunctions" imposed by other judges in that not even Garcia's attorneys had tried "to force the United States to persuade El Salvador to release" their client "on a judicially mandated clock."

As to the court-imposed deadline, the administration's top attorney observed that the federal 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 acknowledged that Garcia's "removal to El Salvador was an administrative error," but still insisted that the circumstances did not grant a district court judge the authority 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."