Prisoners sit at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a mega-prison in Tecoluca, San Vicente, El Salvador, on April 4, 2025. The Trump administration has acknowledged mistakenly deporting a Maryland resident from El Salvador with protected status to the prison but is arguing against returning him to the U.S. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)
This story was updated at 4:34 p.m. Eastern.
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily granted the Trump administration’s request Monday to block a lower court’s order to bring back to the United States a Maryland man who was erroneously deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.
The order from Chief Justice John Roberts that stays a lower court order “pending further order of The Chief Justice or of the Court” came hours after another appeals court upheld an order to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, of Beltsville, Maryland, to the United States.
Roberts’ order is not final, but pauses the lower court’s order to return Abrego Garcia while the justices reach a final decision on that order’s validity.
Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, told reporters Friday she hoped her husband would be returned to the U.S. by the midnight Monday deadline set by a federal judge.
The Trump administration made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Monday, where U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that, despite the government’s admitted error in deporting Abrego Garcia, the lower court does not have the jurisdiction to order the Trump administration to return someone who the administration argues is no longer in U.S. custody.
The appeal to the high court came within minutes of an appeals court panel unanimously upholding the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who set a deadline of midnight Monday for the administration to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
Despite being granted legal protection from deportation by a judge in 2019, immigration officials detained Abrego Garcia and sent him on a March 15 deportation flight to El Salvador, where he was incarcerated at the notorious prison known as Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.
‘The government screwed up’
A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was a major misstep.
“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” two judges on the panel, Robert B. King and Stephanie D. Thacker, wrote.
King was appointed by former President Bill Clinton and Thacker was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
“The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable,” they wrote.
J. Harvie Wilkinson III, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, wrote in his option that “[t]here is no question that the government screwed up here.”
He noted that President Donald Trump’s administration has not made an effort to rectify its mistake.
“The facts of this case thus present the potential for a disturbing loophole: namely that the government could whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done. It takes no small amount of imagination to understand that this is a path of perfect lawlessness, one that courts cannot condone,” Wilkinson said.
The Department of Justice quickly appealed the decision and Xinis issued a scathing 22-page order Sunday that cited records and official statements from Trump officials saying the administration has the power to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
“Neither the United States nor El Salvador have told anyone why he was returned to the very country to which he cannot return, or why he is detained at CECOT,” she wrote. “That silence is telling. As Defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador—let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere.”
Abrego Garcia was on one of three deportation flights to CECOT on March 15. Two flights contained 238 Venezuelans who were deported under a wartime law that is currently being challenged in another court case.
Xinis slammed the Trump administration for arguing that she had no jurisdiction to order Abrego Garcia’s return.
“For the following reasons, their jurisdictional arguments fail as a matter of law,” she said. “Further, to avoid clear irreparable harm, and because equity and justice compels it, the Court grants the narrowest, daresay only, relief warranted: to order that Defendants return Abrego Garcia to the United States.”
She noted that the two countries have an agreement to house more than 250 deported men at CECOT.
The U.S. is paying El Salvador $6 million to detain the men at the prison. Trump is scheduled to meet with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele at the White House on April 14.
In response to the district court’s order to return Abrego Garcia, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, posted a GIF of a confused cartoon bunny on social media.
Attorney placed on leave
The Department of Justice attorney who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, Erez Reuveni, was placed on indefinite administrative leave over the weekend.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said during a Fox News interview Sunday that Reuveni was placed on leave because he did not “vigorously” defend the administration.
Reuveni, a veteran government attorney, has argued for the DOJ over the course of four administrations.
During Friday’s hearing he was candid that the Trump administration had provided him little information on why Abrego Garcia could not be returned to the U.S. and that “the government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
A blender, still in its box, won at a grocery store raffle. Framed photos from a child’s birthday party. A rabbit-hair felt sombrero and a pair of brown leather boots that cost more than half a week’s pay.
Box by box, the Nicaraguans who milk the cows and clean the pens on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, who wash dishes at its restaurants and fill lines on its factory floors, are sending home their most prized possessions, bracing for the impact of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations.
In the contents of the boxes is a portrait of a community under pressure. The Nicaraguans are as consumed as everyone else by the unfolding of Trump 2.0, wondering whether the bluster about deporting millions of people, most of whom live quiet lives far from the southern border, is going to mean anything in the Wisconsin towns where they’ve settled. For now, many are staying in their homes, behind drawn curtains, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as they travel to and from work or pick up their kids from school. Few have given up on their lives in America, but they’re realistic about what may be coming. Methodically, they have begun packing their most cherished belongings into boxes and barrels and shipping them to relatives back in Nicaragua, ahead of their own anticipated deportations.
“We don’t have much, but what we do have is important,” said Joaquín, the man with the love of western boots and sombreros. He’s 35 years old and has worked over the last three years as a cook at the restaurant below his apartment. “We have worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to acquire these things,” he added.
The packing is happening all across Wisconsin, a state that in recent years has become a top destination for Nicaraguans who say they are fleeing poverty and government repression. And it is happening among immigrants of varying legal statuses. There are the undocumented dairy workers who came more than a decade ago and were the first from their rural communities to settle in Wisconsin. And there are the more recent arrivals, including asylum-seekers who have permission to live and work in the U.S. as they await their day in immigration court.
Nobody feels safe from Trump and his promises; in just his first week back in office, the president moved to end birthright citizenship, sent hundreds of military troops to the southern border and launched a flashy, multi-agency operation to find and detain immigrants in Chicago, only a few hundred miles away.
Yesenia Meza, a community health worker in central Wisconsin, began hearing from families soon after Trump’s election; they wanted help obtaining the documents they might need if they have to suddenly leave the country with their U.S.-born children, or have those children sent to them if they are deported. When she visited their apartments, Meza said, she was stunned to discover they had spent hundreds of dollars on refrigerator-sized boxes and blue plastic barrels that they’d stuffed with nearly “everything that they own, their most precious belongings” and were shipping to their home country.
At one home, she watched an immigrant mother climb into a half-packed box and announce, “I’m going to mail myself.” Meza knew she was joking. But some of the immigrants she knew had already left. And if more people go, she wonders what impact their departures — whether voluntary or forced — will have on the local economy. Immigrants in the area work on farms, in cheese-processing factories and in a chicken plant — the kind of jobs, she said, that nobody else wants. She’s talked to some of the employers before and knows “they’re always short-staffed,” Meza said. “They’re going to be more short-staffed now when people start going back home.”
Recently, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, I traveled to Wisconsin along with photographer Benjamin Rasmussen to capture what sounded like the beginning of a community coming undone. We talked to Nicaraguans in their kitchens and bedrooms, and in restaurants and grocery stores that have sprung up to cater to them. Many of the people we met either were packing themselves or knew someone else who was, or both.
Some were almost embarrassed to show us what they were packing — items that might have been considered frivolous or extravagant back home. Nicaragua was already one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere before its government took a turn toward authoritarianism and repression, further sinking the economy. But thanks to their working-class jobs at American factories and restaurants, they could afford these things, and they were determined to hold on to them. Some of their belongings carried memories of loved ones or of special occasions. Other items were more practical, tools that might help them get started again in Nicaragua.
From the stories these immigrants told about their belongings emerged others, stories about what had brought them to this country and what they have been able to achieve here. They spoke about the panic that now traps them in their homes and keeps them up at night. And they shared their hopes and fears about what it might mean to start over in a country they fled.
Yaceth plans to send a plastic barrel filled with shoes to her mother in Nicaragua for safekeeping. (Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
(Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
What’s in the boxes
Yaceth’s guilty pleasure is shoes. The 38-year-old left Nicaragua nearly three years ago and works in the same restaurant kitchen as Joaquín. Her wages allowed her to buy a pair or so a month on Amazon, mostly Keds lace-up sneakers, though she also owns glittery stilettos and knee-high red boots. The boxes fill the top half of her closet. Some pairs have never been worn.
We stood along the edge of her bed, admiring her collection. “I’m a bit of an aficionado,” she said sheepishly. Like the other immigrants we spoke with, Yaceth asked not to be identified by her full name to lessen the risk of deportation.
Yaceth said she stopped buying shoes after Trump’s election, uncertain how her life, not to mention her finances, might change once he took office. By the time we met, she had already packed one box of belongings and sent it to her mother in Estelí, a city in northwestern Nicaragua. In the corner of her already crowded bedroom, she kept a blue plastic barrel, which is where she’d planned to put the shoes, hoping it would keep them dry and undamaged during the shipping. If she goes, they’re going, too.
She rents a room in the apartment of another family. They, too, are thinking about what it might look like to return to Nicaragua. Hugo, 33, is setting aside items that might help him make a living back in his hometown of Somoto, about an hour and a half north of Estelí. This includes a Cuisinart digital air fryer he bought with his wages from a sheet-metal factory. Hugo used to sell hot dogs and hamburgers at a fast food stand in Somoto. If he has to return, he envisions starting another food business. The air fryer would help.
‘Everything that Trump says is against us. It makes you feel terrible.’
Hugo plans to send an air fryer to Nicaragua in the hopes of using it to start a business if he’s deported. (Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
(Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
We visited a new Nicaraguan restaurant in Waunakee, a village in Dane County that’s seen significant numbers of Nicaraguan arrivals in recent years. One diner, a 49-year-old undocumented dairy worker, told me he plans to send barber trimmers and other supplies for the barbershop he’d like to open up if he’s deported. As we spoke, his dinner companion called a friend who lives a few towns away and handed me the phone; that man, also a dairy worker, told me he is sending back power tools he bought on Facebook Marketplace that are expensive and difficult to find in Nicaragua.
Other immigrants expressed deep uncertainty about whether they might face jail time or worse if they are deported, due to their previous involvement in political activities against the Nicaraguan government. If you don’t toe the party line, said Uriel, a former high school teacher, “they turn you into an enemy of the state.”
Uriel, 36, said he never participated in any anti-government marches. But he worried that local party leaders had been watching him, that they knew how he spoke about democracy and free speech in the classroom.
Uriel bought a plastic barrel to send belongings, like a guitar he was given, to his wife and children in Nicaragua. (Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
(Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
He said he left Nicaragua almost four years ago both because of the political situation and because he knew he could make more money in the U.S. He has an ongoing asylum case, a work permit and a job at a bread factory. His wages have allowed him to buy a plot of land for his wife and two children, still in Nicaragua, and begin construction on a house there.
He’d hoped to stay in Wisconsin long enough to pay to finish it. But bracing for the inevitable, he’s got a barrel too. Soon, he plans to pack and send a used Yamaha guitar he was given as a gift a few years earlier. Uriel learned to play the instrument by watching YouTube videos and now plays Christian hymns that he said make him feel good inside.
This summer, he plans to return as well. His children have been growing up without him. He has been told his 6-year-old daughter points to planes in the sky and wonders whether her father is inside. He worries that his son, 11, will grow up believing he has been abandoned.
It has been hard to be separated from his children, he said. But he left in order to provide them a life he didn’t believe he could have if he had stayed — a reality he thought was missing from so much of the new president’s rhetoric on immigration. “We are not anybody’s enemy,” Uriel said. “We simply are looking for a way to make a living, to help our families.”
‘What we’re afraid of is getting picked up on the street and then not having a chance to send home all of the things that cost us so much.’
Joaquín plans to send his clothing to family in Nicaragua. He’s afraid it will end up in a landfill if he’s deported. (Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
(Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
A life in hiding
It used to be that on Sundays, his day off, Joaquín would pull on his favorite boots and sombrero to drive somewhere — to a restaurant or to visit family and friends who had settled in south-central Wisconsin. But ever since Trump’s election, he doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to. Some days, he says, he feels like a mouse, scurrying downstairs to work and upstairs to sleep and back downstairs again to work, always alert and full of dread.
The gray 2016 Toyota 4Runner that he bought last year, his pride and joy, sits mostly unused behind his apartment building. He’s too afraid of driving and getting pulled over by police officers who, by randomly checking his vehicle’s plates, could discover he doesn’t have a driver’s license. Joaquín doesn’t have the documents he needs to qualify for one. He worries that drawing the attention of police, even for the smallest of infractions, could get him swept into the immigration detention system and deported. “What’s happening now is a persecution,” he said.
On a recent Sunday, his apartment was filled with the sweet, warm smell of home-baked goods. Joaquín said he spent two hours making traditional Nicaraguan cookies called rosquillas and hojaldras, one savory and the other sweet. We talked over coffee and the cornmeal cookies. Half of his living room floor was covered with piles of clothes and shoes, and one tall, empty box. There were shirts, pants and sneakers for each of his three children, who remain in Nicaragua. Most of the clothes belonged to Joaquín: a crisp pair of tan Lee jeans, rarely worn; several pairs of boots; a box of sombreros.
Joaquín said he plans to send all of it to relatives in Nicaragua in February. It pains him to imagine being trotted onto a deportation flight and leaving everything he owns here to get tossed in a landfill somewhere.
Another day, I spoke by phone with an immigrant named Luz, 26. Like Joaquín, she said she rarely leaves her apartment anymore. The week Trump was inaugurated, she stopped going to her job at a nearby cheese factory, afraid of workplace raids. She now stays home with their 1-year-old son. A woman she knows picks up the family’s groceries so they don’t have to risk being out on the street.
Like many of her friends and relatives, Luz came to the U.S. as an asylum-seeker almost three years ago. She missed an immigration court hearing while pregnant with her son and now worries she has “no legal status here.”
“Those of us who work milking cows, we can’t afford to hire a lawyer,” she said. “We don’t even know what’s happening with our cases.”
After Trump’s election, she began packing some of the things she’d accumulated in her time in Wisconsin, including some used children’s clothes she’d received from Meza, the community health worker. She packed most everything in her kitchen: most of her pots and pans, some plates and cups, knives, an iron and “even chocolates,” she said, almost laughing. “It is a big box.”
Luz said she wants all of her household items to be in Nicaragua when she returns with her family. They hope to leave in March. “I don’t want to live in hiding like this,” she said.
‘My biggest fear is that they deport me and take my son away.’
Isabel sent her 14-month-old son’s toys and stuffed animals in a cardboard box to Nicaragua. (Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
(Benjamin Rasmussen for ProPublica)
Family separation redux
Isabel’s son cried as she filled her box. In went the shiny red car, big enough for the 14-month-old to sit in and drive. It had been a gift from his godfather on his first birthday. She added other, smaller cars and planes and stuffed animals. A stroller. A framed photo from the birthday party, the chubby-cheeked boy surrounded by balloons.
The 26-year-old mother knew her son was too young to understand. But she hoped he would if the dreaded time came when they had to return to Nicaragua.
And to make sure she wouldn’t be separated from him, she applied for his passport early last fall, when she became convinced that Trump would win the election. She could see his lawn signs all around her in the rural community in the middle of the state where she lives. Her husband, who works on a dairy farm, told her he’d begun feeling uncomfortable with the way people glared at him at Walmart. Sometimes, they shouted things he didn’t understand, but in a tone that was unmistakably hostile.
Their son was born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents — exactly the kind of child Trump says does not deserve citizenship here. Isabel got his passport both to secure his rights as an American citizen and to secure her rights to him. She wants to make sure there is no mistaking who the boy belongs to if she gets sent away.
We met Isabel about a week after she’d shipped off the box with her son’s red toy car to her mother’s home in southern Nicaragua. It was the morning of Trump’s inauguration, and Isabel welcomed us into her apartment, her eyes still red and bleary from an overnight shift at a nearby cheese-processing factory.
She said they were ready to go “if things get ugly” and the people around her start getting picked up and sent back. But there was another box, still flat and unpacked, propped up against a wall in the living room. That one, she explained, belonged to a neighbor with the same game plan.
I ask her what happens if they don’t get deported, but their most precious belongings are gone. Won’t they miss those things? “Yes,” she said. But it would be even worse to go back to Nicaragua and have nothing.
Now with less than a week before Trump’s inauguration, members of Milwaukee’s immigrant community are bracing for the next four years.
“People are taking the (future) administration at their word,” said Alexandra Guevara, communications director for Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant advocacy organization in Milwaukee.
Guevara said her organization has been fielding phone calls from worried residents.
Here are answers to five key immigration-related questions.
Unauthorized immigrants include those who enter the U.S. illegally, overstay a visa or violate terms of admission.
It is unclear how stricter immigration policies will affect those with short-term protections, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Temporary Protective Status.
“But I think the writing is on the wall for those” protections, said Marc Christopher, managing attorney and owner of Christopher & De León Law Office, a law firm based in South Milwaukee that practices immigration law.
Trump’s first administration expanded the use of expedited removal, which allows deportation of an unauthorized individual without appearing before an immigration judge.
Many advocates worry that this expansion will happen again, making people who are unable to prove at least two years of continuous physical presence in the country eligible for expedited removal, said Cain Oulahan, attorney with Oulahan Immigration Law.
Because of the general confusion and shifting political landscape, Guevara worries that there will be an increased risk of racial profiling.
2. What can be expected from local enforcement?
ICE relies on local law enforcement to help carry out its duties, but the level of cooperation with ICE varies greatly depending on the area.
Milwaukee Police Department policy states it does not routinely inquire about immigration status during operations, emphasizing that most immigration violations are civil, not criminal.
However, Christopher thinks it is likely the Trump administration will begin to put more pressure on cities to comply with ICE.
The policy of the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department does not completely shut the door on cooperating with ICE in certain scenarios where someone is detained for committing a crime and is also suspected of being an unauthorized immigrant.
On a practical basis, though, the nature of the crime in this scenario is likely to make a difference, said Ruby De León, staff attorney at Voces.
“It doesn’t seem like day-to-day traffic stops – I don’t believe they would prioritize contacting ICE over these incidents.”
NNS reached out to ICE for comment about its priorities and plans for Milwaukee but did not receive a response.
3. What rights do people have?
Advocates stress that constitutional protections apply regardless of citizenship status, including the right to remain silent, the right to talk to a lawyer and protection from illegal search and seizure.
If law enforcement asks people to show immigration documentation, they have the right to remain silent or refuse to answer questions.
Law enforcement must have reasonable suspicion of unauthorized presence in the country to demand proof of immigration status, said R. Timothy Muth, staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
At the same time, if people are not citizens but have documentation that permits them to stay in the country – such as a green card – they are required to keep that documentation with them, Muth said.
If a person is approached at home, a warrant for deportation allows officers to enter a home only if it is signed by a judge.
“And you should ask to see it,” Muth said. “You ask them to slip it under the door or show it to you at your window. You have a right to see the warrant and look at the signature line.”
With potential immigration violations, people have the right to speak to an attorney. But unlike with criminal arrests, the government does not have to provide the lawyer, De León said.
Additionally, individuals with a legitimate fear of persecution or torture in their home country have a right to seek asylum or asylum-type protection, Oulahan said.
4. What should be avoided if approached by law enforcement?
Voces and the ACLU advise against signing documents without a lawyer, running away or lying.
Running away and lying can be separate criminal acts, Muth said.
If people suspect their rights are being violated, such as being unlawfully searched, then they should not physically intervene, Muth added. They should instead document what they can and clearly state that they do not consent.
Voces and the ACLU also suggest taking photos or videos of agents, noting names and badge numbers.
Advocates recommend ensuring documentation is current, applying for passports for U.S.-born children and pursuing citizenship or legal status if eligible, perhaps through an employer or family member.
A city of Milwaukee municipal ID can serve as a form of identification for city residents who cannot get state identification.
Muth recommends carrying documentation showing continuous presence in the country for more than two years, such as a lease agreement, pay stubs or utility bill in a person’s name.
Voces also suggests completing power-of-attorney forms to plan for potential family separation.
In Wisconsin, undocumented immigrant workers contribute significantly to the workforce, performing labor that often goes unseen. But the exact number has proven difficult to determine.
From outdated and cautious estimates to a lack of monitoring by state agencies, it is difficult to say for certain how many immigrants without legal status work in each industry. Quantifying the undocumented population through surveys and studies is also a challenging task. The U.S. Census doesn’t ask about or estimate the number of undocumented immigrants. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the U.S. total at 11 million as of 2022.
An estimated 70,000 undocumented immigrants live in Wisconsin, about 47,000 of whom are employed, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. About two-thirds of those had lived in the U.S. for 10 years or more. But that information is now over five years old.
The top industries that employ undocumented workers in the state are:
Accommodation and food services, arts, entertainment and recreation — estimated 5,000 workers.
Construction — estimated 5,000 workers.
Agriculture — estimated 5,000 workers.
A 2023 UW-Madison School for Workers survey found that over 10,000 undocumented workers perform around 70% of the labor on Wisconsin’s dairy farms. “Without them, the whole dairy industry would collapse overnight,” the researchers concluded.
This finding sparked a public debate in the wake of stricter immigration policies over the unseen, yet essential work that immigrants without legal status provide to the state’s major dairy and farming industries.
“Obtaining accurate counts of undocumented populations is inherently challenging due to their non-legal status and potential reluctance to participate in official surveys,” said Alexandra Guevara, spokesperson for Voces de la Frontera, a Wisconsin-based immigrant rights organization.
To complicate matters, state agencies like the Department of Administration and the Department of Public Instruction don’t keep records of the number of undocumented immigrants and workers in the state. DPI lacks this data because public schools do not ask about immigration status.
In 2018, undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin paid an estimated $157 million in federal taxes and $101 million in state and local taxes, totaling nearly $258 million, according to the American Immigration Council. That estimate dropped slightly to a total of $240 million in federal, state and local taxes as of 2022.
Undocumented workers make up a large percentage of the workforce in child care and domestic housework. They tend to make up a smaller portion of health care employees and are mainly employed in roles like housekeeping or janitorial and food service in both nursing homes and hospitals, according to Guevara.
National estimates suggest that undocumented workers make up between 30% and 50% of the meatpacking workforce, according to the University of Michigan. Guevara said it is probable that Wisconsin, a major hub for meat and cheese production, follows this trend.
Wisconsin Watch readers have submitted questions to our statehouse team, and we’ll answer them in our series, Ask Wisconsin Watch. Have a question about state government? Ask it here.
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