Abrego Garcia Makes It Through ICE Check-In

Kilmar Abrego Garcia walked away after a scheduled appointment at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office on Friday to the cheers of a crowd assembled outside. Abrego Garcia appeared for the appointment at an ICE field office in Baltimore, some 14 hours after he was released from detention on a judge's orders. A federal judge had ordered that immigration officials could not detain him, the AP reports.

• His lawyers had asked the judge to block authorities from detaining him again. Officials cannot re-detain him until the court conducts a hearing on the motion for the temporary restraining order, US District Judge Paula Xinis in Maryland said. She wrote that Abrego Garcia is likely to succeed on the merits of any further request for relief from ICE detention.

• "For the public to have any faith in the orderly administration of justice, the Court's narrowly crafted remedy cannot be so quickly and easily upended without further briefing and consideration," she wrote.
• Abrego Garcia became a flashpoint of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown earlier this year when he was wrongly deported to a El Salvador. He was last taken into custody in August during a similar check-in.
• Abrego Garcia on Friday stopped at a news conference outside the building, escorted by supporters chanting "We are all Kilmar!" "I stand before you a free man and I want you to remember me this way, with my head held up high," Abrego Garcia said through a translator.

• He urged people to keep fighting. "I will continue to fight and stand firm against all of the injustices this government has done (to) me," Abrego Garcia said. "Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws and I believe that this injustice will come to an end." After Abrego Garcia spoke, he went through security at the field office.
• When Abrego Garcia's attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, announced to the crowd assembled outside that his client would walk back out the field office's doors again, he stressed that the legal fight was not over. "Yesterday's order from Judge Xinis and now the temporary restraining order this morning represent a victory of law over power," Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
• "This time, ICE did not violate a judge's order, and they allowed him to leave," Sandoval-Moshenberg said, per the Baltimore Sun. "We'll never know what ICE's plans were this morning—whether it was simply a check-in or whether they intended to arrest him just like they did in late August. But he's walking out the door and heading back to Prince George's County to be with his family."