Is The Abrego Garcia Case Headed To The Supreme Court? A Conflict With Prior 4th Circuit Decision Seems Dead Ahead.
New habeas petition cites 2019 4th Circuit case that adopted position of Mass. District Court for third country removal that was rejected by SCOTUS.
As I predicted over the weekend, shortly after Kilmar Abrego Garcia (KAG) was taken into custody when checking in with ICE in Baltimore on Monday morning, his attorneys filed a new habeas petition in the District of Maryland seeking to prevent his immediate deportation to Uganda. The petition alleges that he has additional “due process” rights in the Immigration Court to challenge the designation of Uganda as his removal destination. The petition was assigned to Judge Paula Xinis, the same judge who has presided over the civil case brought by his family in March after he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in violation of an Immigration Judge’s ruling that he could not be removed to that country because of a credible fear of persecution. Judge Xinis conducted a hearing by telephone conference hours after the petition was filed, determined that she wanted to have an evidentiary hearing — witness testimony — this coming Friday, and ordered that KAG not be removed from the country prior to that hearing.
While the filing of the new habeas petition was entirely expected — if for no other reason that Judge Xinis had invited it with language she had included in various rulings in the prior civil case — there are some interesting allegations and citations to case law from the Fourth Circuit. One in particular stood out:
The quoted language from the Guzman Chavez case jumped out at me because this is the position that was seemingly rejected by the Supreme Court in DHS v. D.V.D. back in June. That is an accurate quote from the 2019 opinion, but note the reference to the case being “rev’d” — meaning reversed — “on other grounds” and then a citation to a Supreme Court case. That is a way to make the claim that while the holding of Guzman Chavez may no longer be good law, other parts of the opinion were not undermined by the Supreme Court in reversing the outcome. That analysis is towards the end below.
