President Donald Trump's administration may have just shot itself in the foot with a newly announced prisoner swap, in which he gave 250 Venezuelans who were deported to the brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador for 10 Americans jailed there.
Professor and journalist Bill Grueskin remarked on Bluesky, "But we were told that once these detainees arrived in El Salvador, the US had no control over their fates."
Lawyer David Lurie similarly asked, "But wait, I thought the U.S. had no control over the prisoners in El Salvador?"
Judge Paula Xinis has still not issued a decision in the Kilmar Ábrego García case, in which the Justice Department claimed it couldn't stop his deportation or return him to the United States.
Xinis found in April that Ábrego García's arrest was "wholly lawless" and the ongoing imprisonment "shocks the conscience." She then ordered the U.S. to return him by midnight on April 7.
"From now until compliance, [I am] going to require daily statuses, daily updates," Xinis said in the April hearing. "We're going to make a record of what, if anything, the government is doing or not doing."
Judge James Boasberg presided over the case involving several Venezuelan migrants. He ultimately found that his order to turn the planes around was ignored, and thus, criminal contempt charges would be levied against those who made the decision.
A federal appeals court in Washington then paused the judge's plans to begin a contempt proceeding against the Trump administration over the matter. Xinis has not gone that far in the case she is overseeing.
It has been three months since the Washington appeals court put a hold on the contempt probe.
“It’s very unusual,” said Georgetown University School of Law Professor Stephen Vladeck to the New York Times. “An appeals court may need hours or days to figure out an administrative stay, but it doesn’t need weeks and certainly not months.”
California State University Professor Ricardo Valencia commented on X, "The deal to swap Venezuelan deportees for U.S. citizens confirms what many suspected: Trump controlled the fate of all the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador's detention centers. The U.S. had jurisdiction over them."