Livid Judge Castigates Trump DOJ’s Defiance In Abrego Garcia Case

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 to 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.

In insisting on an interpretation of its obligations under existing court orders that is so narrow, cramped, and misleading as to be clearly false, the Trump DOJ has rolled another roadblock in the path of trying to free Abrego Garcia from confinement in his home country of El Salvador, where he has been held since being deported in error on March 15. His deportation came despite an immigration judge’s order specifically barring the U.S. government from removing him to El Salvador.

The Trump administration’s continued tortured reading of the court orders against it emerged in a court filing Tuesday in which lawyers for Abrego Garcia complained to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland that their discovery requests were being stymied.

But this is no ordinary discovery dispute.

Xinis has already directed the administration to facilitate the release of Abrego Garcia, and the Supreme Court has said the administration should handle his case as it would have been had he not been wrongfully deported. But the administration is now objecting to discovery requests because they’re “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.” The Trump DOJ cited the Supreme Court’s ruling for that proposition. But the Supreme Court ruled precisely the opposite in mostly upholding Xinis’ original order: “The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”

In its objection to the discovery request, the Trump administration appeared to be quoting not from the Supreme Court order to which it cited but to the revised order from Xinis, who has made clear in open court in recent days that she rejects the government’s contorted reading of her own order.

But the slow-rolling from the administration goes beyond its mischaracterization of the court orders. According to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, the administration has produced “nothing of substance” in response to discovery requests.

“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,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers told Xinis. “Its interrogatory responses are similarly non-responsive.”

What makes this more than a run-of-the-mill discovery dispute is that Xinis has already found the administration to be not responsive to her orders. More than a month after Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation, it remains unclear what steps, if any, the Trump administration has taken to comply with her directives to facilitate his release. To try to enforce compliance, Xinis ordered daily status updates from the Trump administration. Those status updates have been, at various times late, non-responsive, and incomplete.

While Xinis stopped short of ordering the Trump administration to show cause for why it was not in contempt of court, she made it clear that she would use the discovery process to give her a factual basis to determine if the administration was acting in good faith. She set up an expedited two-week discovery process to determine the underlying facts of the administration’s conduct in the case. “Let’s get to the bottom of this,” she said in a hearing last week.

The administration immediately appealed Xinis’ discovery order to the 4th Circuit, which resulted in last week’s memorable opinion from Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, who warned darkly of the incipient constitutional clash between the executive and judicial branches and the threat to the rule of law presented by this case: “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?”

The government has raised a number of other objections and broadly asserted various privileges — including the state secrets privilege — in response to the discovery requests from Abrego Garcia. It contends it has “put forward a good-faith effort to provide appropriate responses” to the discovery requests. But if Xinis designed the discovery process to pry finally from the Trump administration details about Abrego Garcia’s deportation and detention in El Salvador and what it was doing to correct its error, so far her effort has come up short.