Days after leading Maryland to the Sweet 16, Derik Queen decided to take his talents to the NBA.

“I’m proud to say I’m entering the 2025 NBA draft,” he said on “SportsCenter with Scott Van Pelt” on Friday.

Queen, a 6-foot-10 center who is projected as the No. 10 pick in ESPN’s latest mock draft, earned Associated Press All-America honors and first-team all-Big Ten honors this season. He also averaged 18.6 points in three NCAA tournament games.

Queen scored 27 points in his team’s 87-71 loss to Florida in the Sweet 16. He enhanced his stock with his effort in the postseason.

During his announcement, Queen said he was grateful for his inner circle and former head coach, Kevin Willard, who recently accepted the Villanova job.

Former Texas A&M coach Buzz Williams filled Maryland’s coaching vacancy this week.

“I’d like to thank my mom for everything and all unconditional love,” Queen said.

A federal judge said Friday the government must secure the return of a Prince George’s County, Maryland, man who Immigration and Customs Enforcement admitted it deported in error.

More than three weeks after Kilmar Abrego Garcia was detained and flown to a notorious prison in El Salvador, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered that the government return him to the U.S. in about three days, by the end of the day Monday.

“We concede the facts. The plaintiff should not have been removed,” a Justice Department lawyer said Friday afternoon in court in Greenbelt.

Abrego Garcia, 29, was deported because of an “administrative error,” ICE admitted Monday. The Trump administration went on to accuse Abrego Garcia of being in the gang MS-13, which his family denies.

Abrego Garcia’s wife, lawyers and supporters held a rally Friday morning to call for his release. “Bring Kilmar home,” their signs said.

“Kilmar, if you can hear me … I miss you so much … and I’m doing the best to fight for you and our children,” his wife, Jennifer, said.

A sudden detention and disappearance

Abrego Garcia had just finished his job as a sheet metal worker and was in the car with his young son when ICE pulled him over and detained him.

He was taken to Baltimore and questioned about his alleged ties to MS-13, his wife said in an affidavit. He was then transferred to Louisiana and La Villa, Texas.

Three days after Abrego Garcia was detained, he was flown to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act, ICE confirmed.

His wife spoke to him by phone when he was in the U.S. and tracked his location using ICE’s online detainee locator tool. But when he was flown out of the country, he vanished from the online system and she had no idea where he had been taken.

Finally, she recognized him in a video El Salvador’s president posted to X, showing men in white uniforms being frog-marched and having their heads shaved. In a photo of detainees, she recognized his tattoos.

The government said the order to send Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was an “oversight” and was done “in good faith.”

This week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the administration’s decision, claimed Abrego Garcia is a gang member and said he will not return to the U.S.

One of his attorneys, Lucia Curiel, said Friday that he was accused of being in MS-13 in 2019 and was cleared. She spoke about the conversation she had with him then.

“I delivered the news to him that the judge had cleared him of the reckless, false gang allegations and granted him witholding of removal. I told him that that meant he could live in the U.S. legally, and that the government was prohibited from deporting him to El Salvador. I had never seen him smile so much. That news that I told him was true then and it is true now,” she said.

“The basis for that allegation in 2019 was a confidential informant, you know, one of these anonymous tips,” attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg previously said. “There was never any concrete evidence produced.”

Abrego Garcia has lived in the U.S. since 2011. He left El Salvador as he fled gang violence, including gang members who threatened to kill him in an attempt to extort his parents, Sandoval-Moshenberg said.

At the rally Friday morning, Abrego Garcia’s wife spoke about how much their three kids miss their dad. She said she found their 10-year-old daughter trying to send him messages on her tablet. The little girl said she wished she could trade places with him.

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HYATTSVILLE, Md. (AP) — Lawyers for a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador will ask a federal judge on Friday to order the Trump Administration to return him to the U.S.

The White House already has argued against the idea in legal briefs. They have cast Kilmar Abrego Garcia as an MS-13 gang member and assert that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction over the matter because the Salvadoran national is no longer in the U.S.

Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have countered there is no evidence he was in MS-13. The allegation is based on a confidential informant’s claim in 2019 that Abrego Garcia was a member of a chapter in New York, where he has never lived.

Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation, described by the White House as an “administrative error,” has outraged many and raised concerns about expelling noncitizens who were granted permission to be in the U.S.

The 29-year-old had a permit from the Department of Homeland Security to legally work in the U.S., his attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg said. Abrego Garcia served as a sheet metal apprentice and was pursuing his journeyman license.

Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador around 2011 because he and his family were facing threats by local gangs. A U.S. immigration judge granted him protection in 2019 from being deported back to El Salvador because he was likely to face gang persecution.

Abrego Garcia was released by the immigration judge, while Immigrations and Customs Enforcement did not appeal the decision or try to deport him to another country.

Abrego Garcia later married Vasquez Sura, who is a U.S. citizen, and the couple are parents to their son and her two children from a previous relationship.

A 10 a.m. rally is scheduled on his behalf in Hyattsville, Maryland, and will include his wife. The court hearing is set for 1 p.m. in U.S. District Court in Greenbelt outside of Washington, D.C.

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