For nearly two months, the Trump administration has taken an aggressive stance in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador in March.
Several administration officials — including a former Justice Department lawyer assigned to the case — have openly acknowledged that Mr. Abrego Garcia was flown to El Salvador despite a court order forbidding him from being sent there. But President Trump and some of his top aides have repeatedly insisted that he will not be coming back to the United States.
On Friday, a lawyer for the Justice Department made a new assertion, telling the judge overseeing the case that while Mr. Abrego Garcia’s expulsion was in fact an error, it was neither illegal nor an example of government misconduct.
“Not to split hairs with your honor, but he was removed lawfully,” the lawyer, Jonathan Guynn, said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Maryland.
While Mr. Guynn may have been splitting hairs, it is true that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s legal status was complicated when he was placed on one of three charter planes on March 15 and flown to El Salvador with scores of other immigrants.
In 2019, an immigration judge had found that he was in the United States illegally and could be deported to anywhere except El Salvador, his homeland. That was because the judge had determined that Mr. Abrego Garcia was likely to face persecution there from street gangs if he was sent back.
It has been more than a month since the Supreme Court ordered the White House to work toward securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release. And the recalcitrant public statements by Mr. Trump and members of his cabinet have raised questions about whether his administration is openly defying the Supreme Court’s instructions — and what, if anything, might be done about that.
But even as those weighty issues have simmered in the background, the White House has been confronting a more immediate concern: whether it has abided by a separate court order to answer questions about the way it has been handling the case.
Judge Paula Xinis, who is overseeing the proceeding, pressed Mr. Guynn at the hearing on Friday about the administration’s latest efforts to avoid disclosing details about several key aspects of the case. Those include the diplomatic steps that Trump officials have taken in the past several weeks toward releasing Mr. Abrego Garcia, as well as the nature of the deal between the White House and the Salvadoran government to house deported immigrants in its jails.
The Justice Department has argued that many of those details should not be made public because they amount to state secrets. But Judge Xinis cast doubt on those assertions, suggesting that department lawyers had not yet given her sufficient briefing to determine whether the government’s efforts to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador should be considered sensitive national security information.
The judge also took the administration to task for yet again stonewalling her efforts to get to the bottom of how it has been dealing with the Supreme Court’s order to seek Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release.
Last month, she instructed the government to make four officials available for depositions and complained at Friday’s hearing that the depositions, “to varying degrees, were exercises of utter frustration.”
During a hearing that lasted more than three hours, Judge Xinis adopted an increasingly harsh tone as she reprimanded the government, including cutting Mr. Guynn off midsentence.
It was not the first time that Judge Xinis had chided the Trump administration for dragging its feet in providing information.
In early April, the judge determined that the White House had failed to comply with the Supreme Court’s instructions to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from Salvadoran custody. As an initial remedy, she ordered the government to provide her with daily updates about what steps it had taken and planned to take to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom.
Then, after a federal appeals court directed officials to take a more proactive role in getting him out of custody, Judge Xinis opened an investigation into what exactly the administration had been doing. As part of that inquiry, she ordered Trump officials to answer questions — both in person and in writing — about the deal they had reached to house deported immigrants in El Salvador and what had been done to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from the mega-prison there known as CECOT.
That process also broke down, and Judge Xinis quickly rebuked the government for what she called its “willful and bad faith refusal” to adequately answer the questions. Just as she appeared to be losing patience, the Justice Department asked her for a pause in the question-asking process, suggesting there had been a diplomatic development that justified a seven-day delay.
The New York Times reported that around that time, officials at the State Department had sent a note to their counterparts in El Salvador inquiring about having Mr. Abrego Garcia released, but El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, rejected the offer.
In the end, Judge Xinis granted the Justice Department’s request for a delay, but denied department lawyers when they asked her for a second weeklong pause. Last week, finally faced with having to answer questions about the case, department lawyers countered with their latest legal maneuver: an invocation of state secrets privilege.
Much of what took place in court on Friday was a reprisal of legal issues that have already been fought about in previous filings and hearings.
But what was new was Mr. Guynn’s attempts to assert that the administration had done no wrong when it arrested Mr. Abrego Garcia outside an IKEA in suburban Maryland on March 12 without a warrant and three days later flew him to El Salvador in violation of a previous court order.
During the hearing, Judge Xinis expressed surprise that Mr. Guynn was seeking to alter the government’s position, effectively revising what a different Justice Department lawyer, Erez Reuveni, had told her in court a little more than a month ago.
At that earlier hearing, on April 4, Mr. Reuveni conceded that “the plaintiff, Abrego Garcia, should not have been removed.”
Mr. Guynn responded, “Your honor, I can’t speak to what happened during that first hearing.”
Then the judge cut him off.
“You’ve seen the transcript for this case,” she said. “Come on, you took over for this case.”
She went on to remind Mr. Guynn that Mr. Reuveni had ultimately been fired by the department “for being disloyal because he was an officer of the court answering my questions.”
Judge Xinis ended the hearing by saying that she would reserve judgment for the moment on whether the government could invoke the state secrets privilege.
The administration has sought to use the same tactic in another deportation case.
In late March, the Justice Department invoked the state secrets privilege in an effort to avoid providing data to a federal judge in Washington about three charter planes that flew to El Salvador that month carrying Mr. Abrego Garcia and scores of other immigrants.
The judge in that case, James E. Boasberg, wanted the data in an effort to determine whether the government had flouted his order to turn the planes around. Judge Boasberg’s investigation into the White House’s compliance with his ruling was temporarily put on hold last month by the federal appeals court that sits over him.
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.
Aishvarya Kavi works in the Washington bureau of The Times, helping to cover a variety of political and national news.
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