The case, involving a 20-year-old Venezuelan, comes on the heels of another legal battle over the fate of a different man wrongfully sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration.
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to take steps to seek the return of a 20-year-old Venezuelan man who was deported to El Salvador last month, ruling that his removal violated a previous court settlement intended to protect young migrants with pending asylum cases.
The decision on Wednesday by the judge, Stephanie A. Gallagher, came two weeks after the Supreme Court ordered the White House to seek the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, another migrant who was wrongfully sent to El Salvador as part of the same deportation operation.
Judge Gallagher’s ruling, which cited Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case, was notable for the way it suggested that errors and violations of court directives continued to plague President Trump’s aggressive plan to deport as many as 1 million people in his first year in office.
It also raised the question of how the administration would react to a second judge’s explicit instructions to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported migrant.
Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case in the same federal courthouse in Maryland, is still trying to enforce her order directing the White House to facilitate his release. But Mr. Trump has repeatedly washed his hands of the matter, claiming he is powerless to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States.
The second case involves the 20-year-old Venezuelan identified in court papers only as Cristian. After being convicted of drug charges in January, court papers say, he was deemed by the administration to be subject to Mr. Trump’s recent proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law.