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 Friday morning, government lawyers said it was “impractical” to reply to the judge’s questions the day after the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate” the release of Abrego Garcia, whose detention and imprisonment the high court agreed is “illegal.”
Department of Justice attorneys asked to delay their responses to the judge’s questions until next week. Judge Paula 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,” she said.
The judge gave government lawyers a two-hour extension to reply to her questions. But after blowing past the new deadline for a response, Justice 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.
Trump and his allies have routinely derided judges, particularly those overseeing immigration cases and challenges to the president’s mass deportation agenda, but the latest refusal to comply with a court order has once again put the executive branch on a collision course with the judiciary.
Asked repeatedly during a Friday afternoon hearing for “basic” information about where Abrego Garcia is, and what the government is doing to get him back, Justice Department 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 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," Xinis told deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign. “We’re not re-litigating what [the Supreme Court] put to bed.”
“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.
Abrego Garcia and his U.S. citizen wife are raising their 5-year-old U.S. citizen child as well as two other children from a previous relationship. He first entered the country without legal permission when he was 16 years old after fleeing extortion and gang violence in his home country.
He was among more than 200 people expelled to El Salvador on March 15, despite a court ruling that blocked his removal over humanitarian concerns for his safety. The Trump administration, which has a $6 million arrangement with the Salvadoran government to jail deportees, argued it was powerless to remove Abrego Garcia, even if it wanted to, because he was no longer in custody of the United States.
