Judges in multiple jurisdictions are pressing the Trump administration for answers regarding the wrongful deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
On Friday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C. ordered government lawyers to provide more information about their attempts to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S, The Washington Post reported.
Abrego Garcia’s March deportation to El Salvador was an “administrative error,” a Justice Department lawyer admitted in court months ago. Yet the Maryland dad is still in the Central American country, even after a Supreme Court ruling against the government.
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The Trump administration has one week to hand over all “documents memorializing, documenting, or describing the arrangements between the United States and El Salvador,” Boasberg said in his order.
It was Boasberg’s order that the administration flouted earlier this year when it sent planes carrying Salvadorans and Venezuelans to El Salvador.
Also on Friday, a federal judge in Maryland handling a lawsuit from Abrego Garcia’s family doubted whether the Trump administration was really trying to get him back.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis said that the government has only provided “a bunch of ”’I don’t knows’" in response to her orders requiring daily updates and other things.
“I don’t want to tell you how long it took my wonderful law clerks to count up the ‘I don’t knows,’” Xinis said, telling government lawyers that she may issue a written warning.
The government contends that any pertinent information they have constitutes “state secrets” and would endanger national security.
That claim doesn’t appear to be holding up, especially since government officials have said so much about the case publicly.
Xinis agreed with the plaintiff’s lawyers, who said in a recent filing that the “Government’s assertion of state secrets is consistent with an effort to avoid judicial scrutiny of its actions.”
They had also described how, “Over and over, the Government has stonewalled Plaintiffs by asserting unsupported privileges—primarily state secrets and deliberative process—to withhold written discovery and to instruct witnesses not to answer even basic questions."
Xinis seemed shocked by what one government lawyer had to say on Friday.
“Just so I understand the government’s position—that the warrantless, baseless seizure of a person off the streets of our state, country is not government misconduct?“ she said. ”Okay. All right.”
