Trump Admin Takes Defiance In Abrego Garcia Case To A New Level

A federal judge late Tuesday tore into the Trump administration for its “willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations” in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

In a tersely worded order, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland rejected the vast majority of objections that the Trump administration had raised to discovery requests in the expedited two-week dash she had previously imposed in the face of its repeated defiance of her court orders.

The most glaring discovery objection from the Trump administration rejected the entire premise of the case by mischaracterizing the court orders it is currently under to facilitate the release of Abrego Garcia from confinement in El Salvador – even though Xinis has repeatedly rejected its interpretation of those orders.

“Defendants—and their counsel—well know that the falsehood lies not in any supposed ‘premise’ but in their continued mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s Order,” Xinis wrote in overruling the administration’s objection and ordering it comply with its discovery obligations.

Xinis found “equally specious” the administration’s wide-ranging and non-specific assertions of various privileges to avoid responding to the discovery requests. She again called out Trump DOJ lawyers for their role in asserting the privileges, calling it “a willful refusal to comply” with her orders.

“As Defendants and their counsel know, the proponent of a privilege must demonstrate
the legal and factual bases to invoke the protections that such privilege affords,” Xinis wrote. “And yet, Defendants and counsel stubbornly refuse to provide any basis for the same.”

When Xinis ordered the expedited discovery last week, she had sternly told Trump DOJ lawyers that she would not tolerate any “grandstanding” and that she was going to move the discovery forward briskly. The blanket privilege assertions in particular raised her ire:

“Given that this Court expressly warned Defendants and their counsel to adhere strictly to their discovery obligations, their boilerplate, non-particularized objections are presumptively invalid and reflect a willful refusal to comply with this Court’s Discovery Order and governing rules.”

Xinis also found that a belated offer by Trump DOJ lawyers to meet and confer with plaintiffs counsel about their privilege assertions was “not made in good faith,” pointing to “their repeated refusals to meet and confer about much of anything else.”

The judge’s expressed consternation with Trump DOJ lawyers in the case is unusual. The Justice Department historically has gone to great lengths to establish itself as a reliable narrator in court. The gamesmanship and outright defiance in this case of a federal judge who has been mostly upheld by an appeals court (twice) and the Supreme Court is extraordinary.

In one of her few concessions to the administration in the order, Xinis gave it a new deadline of 6 p.m. ET Wednesday to assert privileges with proper specificity. But she wasn’t finished raking them over the coals for their vague assertions of privilege:

For weeks, Defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this Court’s orders. Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.

As for the remainder of the administration’s general discovery objections, Xinis overruled them. She refused to allow them to block discovery of events prior to April 4 or to exclude Abrego Garcia’s initial detention, removal, and incarceration in El Salvador from the scope of discovery.

When Xinis turned to specific objections raised by the administration, she once again chastised it for acting in bad faith. “Given the context of this case, Defendants have failed to respond in good faith, and their refusal to do so can only be viewed as willful and intentional noncompliance,” she wrote about one exceedingly abbreviated answer to a discovery request. Another answer she called “vague, evasive, and incomplete.”

Xinis did toss the administration a couple of meager bones when she ordered plaintiffs to immediately narrow the scope of a few discovery requests and struck another entirely. But the overall thrust of the order was clear: The administration’s dilatory tactics in discovery mirrored its earlier refusal to comply with her court orders and were leaving her no choice but to adjudge that the administration is acting in bad faith.

Given that Xinis had ordered the expedited discovery in order to determine whether to open a contempt of court proceeding and to create a record on appeal of the administration’s bad faith defiance of the federal courts, the clash over the discovery requests puts the Abrego Garcia case even more firmly at the nexus of the constitutional clash between President Trump and judicial branch.

Original story:

The Trump administration is at it again.

In its ongoing stonewalling of the district court judge overseeing the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump DOJ is now slow-rolling discovery by insisting on a tortured reading of court orders in the case, including from the Supreme Court.