Justice Department defies judge in case of deported Maryland man

Continuing a pattern of stonewalling, the Justice Department has defied a judge’s order to explain what the Trump administration has done, and plans to do, to seek the release of a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month, according to court papers filed today.

In refusing to reveal much of anything about the administration’s role in improperly sending the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador or its subsequent efforts to seek his freedom, department lawyers repeatedly claimed that the information constituted state secrets that needed to be protected, the papers said.

“The government responded to plaintiffs’ discovery requests by producing nothing of substance,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote this morning to Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the case in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

In their letter, the lawyers asked Xinis to hold a hearing as early as 1 p.m. Wednesday to discuss how to proceed with what they described as the “government’s failure to comply with this court’s orders.”

The White House’s repeated resistance to court orders — not only in Abrego Garcia’s case, but in other legal proceedings as well — has edged the administration ever closer to an open showdown with the judicial branch in a way that could threaten the constitutional balance of power.

Three courts — including the Supreme Court and the federal appeals court that sits over Xinis — have directly told the Trump administration to “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia. They have instructed the administration to devise a way of handling his case as it should have been handled if the government had not erroneously flown him to El Salvador on March 15 in violation of an earlier court order.

Remarkably, however, the Justice Department, in the papers filed today, seemed not to understand those instructions — or perhaps was simply flouting them altogether. Several times, department lawyers said that they were refusing to answer questions about the case because they were “based on the false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador” — which is, of course, precisely what they had been told to do.

The administration’s recalcitrance in Abrego Garcia’s case is only one part of a broader obstructive approach that the Justice Department has taken to the courts — and to court orders — in a variety of legal proceedings in recent weeks.

Trump officials have been threatened with criminal contempt proceedings in another deportation case in Washington involving scores of Venezuelan immigrants sent to El Salvador under the expansive powers of a wartime statute called the Alien Enemies Act.

They are also facing judicial scrutiny into whether they violated a court order to pause mass firings in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Xinis opened her own high-stakes investigation into the administration’s failure to comply with orders at a court hearing in Maryland this month in which she scolded Trump officials for having done nothing to follow her instructions and those of the courts above her.

She has allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to ask officials in the administration 15 questions in writing, known as interrogatories, and request from them 15 types of documents pertaining to the case. The Justice Department faced a deadline of 5 p.m. Monday to respond to the lawyers’ requests, but when the lawyers received the department’s answers, they found them lacking.

“Its document production consists entirely of public filings from the dockets, copies of plaintiffs’ own discovery requests and correspondence, and two nonsubstantive cover emails transmitting declarations filed in this case,” the lawyers told Xinis. “Its interrogatory responses are similarly nonresponsive.”

In an aggressive move, Justice Department lawyers summarily declared that they were not going to discuss anything that happened in the case before April 4, when Xinis issued an early order demanding that the White House do what it can to bring Abrego Garcia back.

That meant the lawyers were trying to place off limits any inquiry into who had authorized Abrego Garcia’s “initial placement” in a notorious terrorism detention center known as CECOT or about the agreement the United States had reached with the Salvadoran government about housing scores of other deported migrants at the facility.

Last week, after visiting Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said that he had been moved from CECOT to a different prison. The Justice Department subsequently confirmed the move, giving no explanation for why it took place but noting, in a curious phrase, that Abrego Garcia was no longer in “a cell,” but rather in “a room of his own with a bed and furniture.”

In their response to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, lawyers for the Justice Department also doubled down on the administration’s view that President Donald Trump is powerless to free Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody.

“Upon Abrego Garcia’s repatriation to El Salvador, his detention was no longer a matter of the United States’ confinement,” the department lawyers wrote, “but a matter belonging to the government of El Salvador — which has been explained to the plaintiffs repeatedly.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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