Donald Trump’s administration refused a court order for updates on a wrongfully imprisoned Maryland father locked up in El Salvador’s notorious prison, and to outline what steps, if any, they’re taking to get him home.
After refusing to file a written response on Friday morning, government lawyers could not answer questions from a federal judge in person during a hearing about the status of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who has spent nearly one month in a brutal Salvadoran jail after he was deported because of an “administrative error.”
In court filings, government lawyers said it was “impractical” to reply to the judge’s questions after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia, whose detention and imprisonment was “illegal.”
Asked repeatedly for “basic” information about where Abrego Garcia is, and what the government is doing to get him back, Department of Justice lawyers said they could not answer.
“We’re going to make a record of what, if anything, the government is doing or not doing,” Judge Paula Xinis told government lawyers on Friday.
The judge is demanding daily updates on Abrego Garcia’s location and status, as well as what efforts the administration is making to “facilitate” his return, as the Supreme Court ordered.
“We’re not gonna slow walk this,” Judge Xinis told deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign. “We’re not re-litigating what [the Supreme Court] put to bed.”
On Friday morning, Justice Department attorneys asked to delay their responses to the judge’s questions until next week. Judge Xinis called their request “another stunning display of arrogance and cruelty.”
The government’s “act of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was wholly illegal from the moment it happened,” the judge replied, and the suggestion that lawyers “need time to meaningfully review a four-page order that reaffirms this basic principle blinks at reality.”
The judge gave government lawyers a two-hour extension to reply to her questions. But after blowing past the new deadline for a response, Judge Department lawyers said they were not able to answer.
“In light of the insufficient amount of time afforded to review the Supreme Court’s Order following the dissolution of the administrative stay in this case, Defendants are not in a position where they ‘can’ share any information requested by the Court,” Justice Department attorneys wrote in their reply. “That is the reality.”
The exchange marked an escalation of the administration’s defiance of the courts that legal scholars fear is putting the country on the brink of a constitutional crisis.
“The Supreme Court made their ruling last night very clear that it’s the administration’s responsibility to ‘facilitate’ the return, not to ‘effectuate’ the return,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Friday.
