The Trump administration must begin providing daily updates about the location of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was deported last month and sent to a prison in El Salvador known for its rampant human rights abuses, a judge ordered Friday.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis expressed frustration with Justice Department lawyers during a short hearing Friday after they flatly told her they did not have any information to provide about the 29-year-old man’s location.
“The Supreme Court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can’t get an answer,” Xinis said, referring to an order issued by the high court late Thursday.
Xinis directed the Justice Department to provide daily updates not just about where Abrego Garcia actually is, but about what efforts the government has undertaken to bring him back to the States and what it plans to do going forward.
“We are going to make a record of everything the government is doing and not doing,” Xinis told Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign.
On Thursday night, the Supreme Court ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return.
That was not a direct order to force his return to America, but the high court noted it wanted the district court judge to ask the DOJ to clarify, “with due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” what steps the administration has so far taken to bring the father of three back to the U.S.
Abrego Garcia is married to a U.S. citizen. His lawyers say that, for the last 10 years while he has been living in the U.S., he has had no criminal record. An immigration court order from 2019 stated that he should not be removed to El Salvador due to fears of persecution.
Nonetheless, he was deported on March 15.
Erez Reuveni, the federal attorney who admitted that Abrego Garcia should not have been deported, was swiftly taken off the case by Attorney General Pam Bondi and put on administrative leave.
The hearing got off to a rocky start before it even began as federal prosecutors missed a deadline at 9:30 a.m. to provide Xinis with answers about the case.
Instead, they asked the judge to cancel the Friday afternoon hearing and give them until next week to “meaningfully” respond to her and the Supreme Court’s directions. Xinis swiftly denied that request, saying the notion that the Justice Department couldn’t comply “blinks at reality.”
Yaakov Roth, the acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, fired back a pointed response before prosecutors met with Xinis face-to-face, saying the department was “under no obligation to take action” and that they needed more time.
“That is the reality,” Roth wrote.
During the hearing, other lawyers for the administration were equally defiant, saying they could be prepared to give answers by Tuesday but if they did, the judge should be forewarned: The DOJ may invoke certain privileges that would keep details under wraps.
“We’re not going to slow walk this,” Xinis said, according to Politico. “We’re not relitigating what the Supreme Court already put to bed.”
Abrego Garcia’s lawyers expressed outrage at the Trump administration, accusing them of being dishonest, obfuscating and “playing games.”
Carl Tobias, the Williams Chair of Law at the University of Richmond School of Law Virginia, noted to HuffPost Friday that the Justice Department has been “extremely aggressive” with its arguments throughout the case.
That isn’t always something judges like, he said.
“Especially when the DOJ admitted on the facts that it screwed up [when it deported Abrego Garcia],” he said.
But so far, Xinis, at least to his eye, has come across “tough-minded, direct, and clear.”
Michael McConnell, Stanford Law School professor and director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, told HuffPost in an interview Friday that it did not seem wholly unreasonable for the Justice Department to ask that the court give the administration until early next week to respond with answers to questions about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts.
Though next week did not strike him as “inordinately long,” he did note that it seemed like it should be easy enough to tell the court where Abrego Garcia is located since it was known in March that he was sent to the prison in El Salvador.
The Justice Department did not immediately return a request for comment Friday.
Xinis told prosecutors she suspected that because the government was unable to provide any information about Abrego Garcia, that likely meant nothing was being done to facilitate his return.
If prosecutors wanted to “combat that” notion, she said, then all the Justice Department would need to do is tell her whether anything had been done at all.
“I’m asking a very simple question,” she said Friday. “Where is he?”
Jennifer Bendery contributed to this story.