For the better part of two months, lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, have been complaining loudly about the Trump administration’s persistent efforts to dodge court orders instructing it to work toward freeing him from Salvadoran custody.
Their search for accountability continued even after the White House brought Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States last week — albeit to face an indictment that was investigated and filed while he was overseas.
But late on Wednesday night, the lawyers sent the federal judge handling the case their most detailed inventory yet of what they described as the administration’s “sustained and flagrant” violations. The lawyers also asked the judge, Paula Xinis, to do something about it. They said that they wanted her to appoint a special master to investigate the failure by Trump officials to comply with her instructions and to impose financial penalties, if warranted, as a punishment for contempt.
The 33-page filing by the lawyers contained a litany of purported wrongdoing by the Trump administration and accused officials in the Homeland Security and Justice Departments of throwing up evasions at every turn, harboring a disdain for the judicial process and, in one instance, potentially lying under oath.
It gave a strong flavor of the lawyers’ frustration after almost two months of failing to get answers to the question of what the White House had been doing to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release before it suddenly changed course last Friday by bringing him back to face indictment.
“Nearly 60 days, 10 orders, three depositions, three discovery disputes, three motions for stay, two hearings, a weeklong stay and a failed appeal later,” the lawyers wrote, “the plaintiffs still have seen no evidence to suggest that the defendants took any steps, much less ‘all available steps,’ to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States ‘as soon as possible’ so that his case could be handled as it would have been had he not been unlawfully deported.”
It remains unclear how Judge Xinis, who sits in Federal District Court in Maryland, will handle all of this — although she, too, has made no secret of her annoyance with the government.
In mid-April, she scolded lawyers for the Justice Department from the bench for having done nothing at all to comply with her order — upheld by the Supreme Court — to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s freedom. One week later, she accused the same lawyers of “a willful and bad faith refusal” to obey a separate order she had issued, directing the administration to tell her what it had done, and planned to do, to comply with her first one.
The new filing by Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers will certainly not reduce her irritation, describing, as it does, how after all this time the Justice Department has still not produced “a single document detailing even a single step to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.”
The filing also drew the judge’s attention to nearly 50 times when President Trump or officials working under him said in public that they would not — or could not — free Mr. Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, directly contradicting what Justice Department lawyers were telling her in court.
In one of the filing’s most serious allegations, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said that Joseph Mazzara, the acting general counsel of the Homeland Security Department, “may have given untruthful testimony” when he sat for a deposition last month. While much of the material concerning Mr. Mazzara was redacted, the lawyers said his testimony seemed to be contradicted by internal department communications that appeared in an article published last month by The New York Times.
The Abrego Garcia case is not the only legal matter arising from the president’s aggressive deportation agenda in which officials have faced the possibility of contempt.
In April, James E. Boasberg, the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington, threatened to open contempt proceedings into whether the administration had violated an order he issued directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador. But the federal appeals court that sits over Judge Boasberg quickly stepped in and put that threat on hold.
Last month, a different judge handling a different deportation case found that administration officials had violated an order he issued barring the White House from expelling people to countries not their own without first giving them sufficient time to object.
As part of his finding, that judge, Brian E. Murphy, who sits in Federal District Court in Boston, said that officials involved in the case could eventually face contempt penalties. But after three weeks, Judge Murphy has not opened a contempt investigation.
Top officials at the Justice Department have said they believe that Judge Xinis’s order to free Mr. Abrego Garcia had been rendered moot by his return to the United States to face criminal charges. Shortly after the charges were unsealed, department lawyers asked the judge to put all of the proceedings in the civil case on hold as they prepared a motion to dismiss it.
But that has not happened, allowing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to file their request for sanctions even as his criminal case moves forward.
In that case, which is being heard in Federal District Court in Nashville, prosecutors have accused him of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle thousands of undocumented immigrants across the country as a member of the street gang MS-13.
Defense lawyers representing Mr. Abrego Garcia filed court papers earlier on Wednesday night asking a judge to release him as he awaits trial. The government has asked that he be detained, and a hearing has been scheduled for Friday morning to determine whether he should be freed or held in custody.
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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