A federal judge in Maryland blasted the Trump administration on Tuesday for flouting her instructions to answer questions about what steps it had taken, and planned to take, in seeking the release of a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month.
The sharp rebuke by the judge, Paula Xinis, contained in an eight-page order, suggested she had lost her patience with the Justice Department’s pattern of stonewalling her in the case involving the deported man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.
In her order, Judge Xinis accused the department of “a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.” She also dismissed as “specious” its attempts to evade providing information about how Mr. Abrego Garcia ended up in a Salvadoran prison by claiming that it amounted to privileged state secrets that needed to be protected.
“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,” Judge Xinis wrote, giving vent to her frustrations. “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.”
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote to Judge Xinis, accusing the government of “producing nothing of substance” in response to a list of 15 questions and 15 requests for documents that it had given to the Justice Department in an effort to determine what, if anything, the White House had done to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody.
The lawyers asked the judge to hold a hearing on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Maryland to decide how to proceed. But the judge, indicating that she had reached the end of her rope, skipped past a courtroom conversation altogether and simply told the government what it had done wrong.
The White House’s repeated resistance to court orders — not only in Mr. 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.
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 an 18th-century wartime statute called the Alien Enemies Act.
The administration is also facing judicial scrutiny into whether it violated a court order to pause mass firings at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Three courts — including the Supreme Court and the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Xinis — have now told the Trump administration to “facilitate” the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia. They have also instructed the administration to devise a way of handling his case as it should have been handled had the government not erroneously flown him to El Salvador on March 15 in violation of an earlier court order.
Remarkably, however, the Justice Department, in the court papers filed on Tuesday morning, seemed not to understand those instructions — or perhaps was simply ignoring them. 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.
In her order, Judge Xinis scoffed at what she called this “false premise objection,” chiding the Justice Department and the White House for having raised it in the first place.
“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,” she wrote.
President Trump and several of his aides have accused Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old sheet metal worker who came to the United States illegally in 2012, of being a member of the violent street gang MS-13. The White House has often suggested that as an alleged gang member, Mr. Abrego Garcia is not worthy of the typical protections of due process.
But Judge Xinis called out the Justice Department for evading a question from Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers asking it for proof about his membership in the gang and demanding that department lawyers provide it.
“Defendants cannot invoke the moniker of MS-13,” she wrote, “then object to follow-up interrogatories seeking the factual bases for the same.”
Judge Xinis also took the department to task for summarily declaring that it would not discuss anything that happened in the case before April 4, when the judge issued an early order demanding that the White House do what it could to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back.
That meant the lawyers were trying to place off limits any inquiry into who had authorized Mr. Abrego Garcia’s “initial placement” in a terrorism detention center known as CECOT or into the agreement the United States had reached with the Salvadoran government to house scores of other deported migrants at the facility.
“Defendants’ arbitrarily cramped reading of the court’s order is rejected,” Judge Xinis wrote. “At a minimum, the discovery period contemplates the time immediately preceding Abrego Garcia’s lawless seizure on March 12, 2025, and his transport to and confinement in CECOT, which all predate April 4, 2025.”
Last week, after visiting Mr. Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said that Mr. Abrego Garcia had been moved from CECOT to a different prison. The Justice Department confirmed the move, giving no explanation for why it took place but noting, in a curious phrase, that Mr. Abrego Garcia was no longer in “a cell,” but rather in “a room of his own with a bed and furniture.”
Still, Judge Xinis asserted that “information regarding Abrego Garcia’s removal, as well as placement and confinement in CECOT, cut to the heart of the inquiry.”
The judge also had stern words for the Justice Department’s argument that the Trump administration was powerless to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody because he was being held by a sovereign nation.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, she wrote, “are entitled to discover all relevant and probative evidence that undermines the defendants’ incomplete and evasive answer that Abrego Garcia is in the ‘sovereign, domestic custody’ of El Salvador.”
“Indeed,” she went on, “custody can be joint, and custodial status may be controlled by the defendants acting in concert with El Salvador.”
Judge Xinis opened her 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 Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to ask the administration not only for documents and written answers to questions, but also to depose up to six of its officials.
Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers are scheduled to depose two Trump officials this week. Judge Xinis has allowed them to ask for more depositions, if they want them, on Wednesday.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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