A federal court refused the Justice Department’s petitions to dismiss Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s lawsuit over his erroneous deportation to El Salvador, finding one of the motions “meritless.”

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, an Obama appointee, did not immediately decide on Abrego Garcia’s request to be transferred to a federal prison in Maryland while awaiting his criminal trial in Tennessee on human trafficking accusations.

Xinis informed Justice Department attorney Bridget O’Hickey, “You made three arguments, defendants, and none are availing … meritless.”

Xinis, who had directed the government to assist Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States after he was deported to El Salvador in March, questioned O’Hickey on whether the US had indicted him to facilitate his return. When Xinis arrived in the United States in June and was promptly charged, the government did not contact his or Abrego Garcia’s counsel.

Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran native, was one of over 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran males deported from the United States to El Salvador and incarcerated in CECOT, a maximum-security prison, in mid-March.

Soon after, he sued the government over his deportation. His updated lawsuit requests that Xinis be kept in Maryland rather than Tennessee, where he is now incarcerated, and that his deportation be halted.

“Obviously you did have power to produce Mr. Abrego because you produced him less than a week later.” Xinis told the government, citing the May 21 date of a sealed indictment against Abrego Garcia in Tennessee filed six days after a motion in Maryland that said the government had no power to return him to the U.S.

Xinis said it as “highly problematic” that the government planned to investigate Abrego Garcia and bring him back for trial without alerting her court. “We knew it was coming because eventually it was unsealed,” she told me. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys informed Xinis that they learned of his return to the United States via press reports.

Abrego Garcia was brought to the United States in June and promptly charged on human trafficking charges in Tennessee stemming from a traffic stop in 2019. He is being imprisoned in Tennessee awaiting trial.

O’Hickey argued that Abrego Garcia’s complaint should be dismissed, noting that the government was in continuous talks with El Salvador to send him back to the United States at the same time the Justice Department filed its petition to dismiss.