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Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia was released from federal custody Friday in Tennesee and is slated to return to his family in Maryland, though his legal proceedings are far from over.
Abrego Garcia, who was charged earlier this year with transporting illegal migrants in the U.S., will remain under the custody of his brother.
The criminal investigation that resulted in those charges, stemming from a 2022 traffic stop, was later revealed to have begun while he was detained in El Salvador, raising questions about the nature of the probe.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes on Friday entered a new federal court order in the Middle District of Tennessee detailing certain conditions of his release from federal custody, where his attorneys had asked that he be held for an additional 30 days, citing fears that he would immediately be arrested by ICE and deported again — this time to a third country, such as Mexico or South Sudan.
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The order Friday codifies certain conditions of Abrego Garcia’s release. It clarifies that he should be placed in the custody of his brother — who is his designated third-party custodian — prior to trial. Abrego Garcia will also be required to wear an electronic monitoring device, and report to Pretrial Services for the District of Maryland. It also orders him to report there no later than 10 a.m. on Monday, August 25.
“Thereafter, Abrego must remain in the custody of his brother as the designated third-party custodian and in compliance with all conditions of pretrial release,” Holmes said in her order.
News of his release was met with fierce backlash by some Trump officials, including DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who assailed Abrego Garcia’s release in a statement Friday as the work of “activist liberal judges” who have “attempted to obstruct” law enforcement.
“We will not stop fighting till this Salvadoran man faces justice and is OUT of our country,” she vowed
Fox News was told by multiple sources that neither DHS nor ICE has “immediate plans” to arrest Abrego Garcia on immigration grounds, due to the conditions laid out by a federal judge in Maryland.
Still, the conditions of his release from federal custody, which were codified in excruciating detail in two separate federal districts in Tennessee and Maryland, have apparently sparked frustration among staff at both agencies, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The agencies have reportedly been consulting with the Justice Department on further guidance, though any next steps on the matter remain unclear.
Lawyers for the Justice Department, for their part, had vehemently opposed Abrego Garcia’s release, arguing at an evidentiary hearing earlier this year that he was a danger to the community.
But Holmes and U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw separately determined that Abrego Garcia was eligible to be released from criminal custody pending trial — Crenshaw, for his part, said in his ruling that the Justice Department “fails to provide any evidence that there is something in Abrego’s history, or his exhibited characteristics, that warrants detention.”
Holmes agreed to stay Abrego Garcia’s release from federal custody in July for a 30-day period that expired on Friday. She did so at the request of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, who had cited fears that ICE would detain him and immediately begin the process to remove him to a third country.
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Justice Department officials told U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland last July that they planned to immediately take Abrego Garcia into ICE custody pending his release from U.S. Marshal custody in Tennesee and deport him to a third country, regardless of the status of his criminal case.
“There’s no intention to just put him in limbo in ICE custody while we wait for the criminal case to unfold,” a lawyer for DOJ told Judge Xinis.
She later issued an order blocking ICE from immediately deporting Abrego Garcia when he is released from federal custody.
Xinis, who since March has presided over the separate, months-long civil case that was brought by his family, also ordered the Trump administration in July to give Abrego Garcia a 72-hour notice period before beginning any deportation proceedings. This was done, she said, in order to give him the opportunity to consult with his attorneys or to challenge his removal to a third country via the appropriate channels.
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Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador in March in violation of a 2019 court order, and in what Trump administration officials later acknowledged was an “administrative error.”
He entered the country illegally more than a decade ago and had been living in Maryland with his wife and child when authorities deported him to a maximum security prison in El Salvador in March.
Trump officials have repeatedly alleged that Abrego Garcia is a vicious MS-13 gang member — a notion Judge Crenshaw dismissed as “fanciful.”
Earlier this week, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the criminal case against him, arguing in a new court filing that the criminal case by the Trump administration amounts to a “vindictive” and selective prosecution.
“Those motions are infrequently made and rarely succeed,” they acknowledged. “But if there has ever been a case for dismissal on those grounds, this is that case.”
Fox News’s Bill Melugin contributed to this report.
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