Any immigration attorney knows that the government is never a truly equal adversary. Thanks to federal and state laws, it’s hard to sue the government. It commands immense power, budget, and judicial deference. In immigration law, that imbalance is perhaps most acute: the courts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counsel charging the immigrant with removability, and immigration judges (IJs) all sit inside the executive branch.
The Trump administration has targeted IJs for dismissal based on their progressive interpretation of immigration law and for replacement with loyalists coined “deportation judges,” sourced from the military. Immigrants rarely win, and that is not counting the many who are unrepresented in removal proceedings.
And yet.
Courts have now ordered the Trump administration to return wrongfully removed individuals at least five times since January 2025, and in several of those cases, the government has actually complied. How It Works There are two circumstances in which a removed noncitizen can be ordered back to the United States. The first involves no error at all. When noncitizens lose before an immigration judge and the Board of Immigration Appeals, they may petition a federal circuit court for review. Thanks to the REAL ID Act of 2005, the circuit courts are the sole and exclusive forum for challenging a final removal order, bypassing the district courts entirely.
The problem is that filing that petition does not automatically stop deportation. If no stay of removal is obtained and the person is removed while the appeal is pending, the United States may still be required to bring them back if they ultimately win. The Department of Homeland Security has even issued guidance acknowledging that right.
The second circumstance involves error. The current administration’s hasty, quantity-focused removal posture has produced these errors at a rate rarely seen before. They include people deported despite holding granted asylum claims, lawful permanent resident status, active stays of removal, Temporary Protected Status, class action settlement protections, or court orders specifically barring their removal to a particular country.
This means that the United States will be forced to return a noncitizen even if, in some cases, they entered the country without lawful status and never acquired it. Five Cases, Five Orders This is a real issue happening in real time. Since Trump took office, courts have ordered the administration to return at least five wrongfully removed individuals.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national living in Maryland with a court-ordered withholding of removal, was deported to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison on March 15, 2025, in what the government admitted was an administrative error . After orders from the district court, the Fourth Circuit, and the Supreme Court, he was returned on June 6, 2025, and now faces federal smuggling charges to which he has pleaded not guilty.
“Cristian,” a 20-year-old Venezuelan deported the same day under the Alien Enemies Act, in violation of a 2024 class action settlement protecting his right to have his asylum application adjudicated while present in the United States, was ordered returned by Trump-appointed Judge Stephanie Gallagher, though compliance remains stalled as of last reports.
O.C.G., a Guatemalan national deported to Mexico just two days after an immigration judge ruled he could not be sent there, and subsequently removed to Guatemala where he lived in hiding, was ordered returned by Judge Brian Murphy on due process grounds and physically returned to ICE custody by June 2025, before later being released on bond pending adjudication of his case.
Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron, a Salvadoran man deported to El Salvador on May 7, 2025, just thirty minutes after the Second Circuit barred his removal, was ordered returned by that court on June 24, 2025, with the administration directed to report on his location and return plan within one week. As of early 2026, the administration has not complied, telling the court it could not locate him; he remains in Izalco Prison in El Salvador.
Most recently, on May 13, 2026, Judge Richard J. Leon ordered the return of Adriana Maria Quiroz Zapata, a 55-year-old Colombian woman deported to the Democratic Republic of Congo despite that country’s written refusal to accept her on medical grounds, in apparent violation of the federal statute requiring receiving-country consent for third-country deportations. Her case is the first to expose that the administration’s third-country workaround can fail on its own legal terms, and a reminder that the moral cost of these removals, sent to countries with no connection to the people being sent there, has not yet prompted the public reckoning it deserves. She currently remains in the DRC, and the administration has not complied with the court order. What These Cases Establish The Abrego Garcia case proved something that many assumed impossible: the government can be ordered to return a removed individual, and it will comply, even after publicly declaring that it never would. His return was challenged by the highest powers in Washington, yet he won.
His return also carried concrete legal benefits. It provided him a lawful entry, resolved what would otherwise have been a future bar to relief, and opened a new one-year window for him to seek asylum. The same can apply to any individual who secures a government-facilitated return following wrongful removal: the procedural timelines will be reset and the bars that unlawful removal created will be nullified.
The Zapata case is also important. The administration has used third-country deportation agreements as a common workaround for individuals it cannot legally remove to their home countries. Zapata’s case makes clear that such workarounds have their own legal ceiling: federal law requires the receiving country to consent, and when it does not, the deportation fails.
These two victories show one thing above all: justice can prevail against what seems to be the strongest hand of cards.
The post Where Legal Challenges Are Helping Deportees appeared first on Foreign Policy In Focus .