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Main: President Donald Trump during an event on energy production in the East Room of the White House, Tuesday, April 8, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon). Inset: Kilmar Abrego Garcia in undated photo (CASA).
A federal judge in Maryland on Tuesday took the Trump administration to task, accusing Justice Department attorneys of intentionally ignoring a court order to produce information regarding the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious work prison in El Salvador.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis rejected many of the government’s proposed objections to Abrego Garcia’s discovery requests and denounced the DOJ’s “mischaracterization” of the Supreme Court’s order from earlier this month requiring the government to “facilitate” the Maryland father’s release from El Salvador.
“Defendants’ objection reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations,” Xinis wrote in the eight-page order, referring to the government’s repeated attempts to interpret the high court’s ruling as only requiring them to remove domestic obstacles preventing Abrego Garcia’s return. The judge overruled the objection, ordering the Justice Department to supplement its answers to include “facts responsive to the requests, not oblique and incomplete, non-specific characterizations.”
Taking aim at the administration’s numerous “specious” assertions of privilege to avoid answering questions, Xinis said the responses directly contravened specific instructions from the court.
“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 wrote. “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.”
The government is also refusing to divulge the person or persons responsible for authorizing Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador, which Xinis called “a deliberate evasion of their fundamental discovery obligations.”
“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,” the order states.
The assertion that it was “unduly burdensome” for the government to state what steps it had taken to “facilitate the return of aliens wrongfully removed to El Salvador” was similarly rejected by Xinis, who reasoned that the administration had “made absolutely no showing as to why it cannot, with a modicum of due diligence, answer the question.”
The court ordered the administration to file proper responses to Abrego Garcia’s discovery requests by 6 p.m. Wednesday.
Early Wednesday morning, the DOJ filed a sealed motion seeking a seven-day stay of discovery in the case, which comes one day after filing its status report under seal.
Abrego Garcia’s case has garnered international attention, quickly becoming one of the most high-profile and contentious lawsuits amid the blizzard of legal challenges filed against Trump and his administration since he retook office in January. The government has conceded in numerous filings that he removal to El Salvador was an “administrative error,” but has steadfastly insisted that he is a member of MS-13 and refused to cooperate with multiple court orders demanding he be brought back to the country.
Notably, the government has proffered little, if any, evidence that Abrego Garcia was a gang member. He has no criminal record in the U.S. or El Salvador and has submitted sworn statements that he was fleeing El Salvador due to gang violence.
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