Deportee's Lawyers Push for Contempt Proceedings Despite His Return
Just because Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is back on U.S. soil to face criminal charges after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador does not mean that the Trump administration's troubles in the monthslong civil case have come to an end.
On Sunday, lawyers for Mr. Abrego Garcia in the civil case filed blistering court papers arguing that even though the White House had finally complied with an order to return their client, the judge overseeing the case should still pursue contempt proceedings against Trump officials. The administration, the lawyers wrote, had spent much of the past three months 'engaged in an elaborate, all-of-government effort to defy court orders.'
The papers, filed in Federal District Court in Maryland, where Mr. Abrego Garcia's family first filed suit in March to force the government to bring him back, had equally fiery words for the federal criminal indictment that was filed against him in Nashville on Friday. The indictment accused Mr. Abrego Garcia of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle thousands of undocumented immigrants across the United States as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.
In their court papers on Sunday, his lawyers in the civil case said that the White House's evident ability to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States to face criminal charges put the lie to repeated claims by administration officials that they were unable to get him out of El Salvador at all. The lawyers also framed the indictment itself as the administration's 'latest act of contempt,' accusing the Justice Department of starting to work on it only while the department was 'under threat of sanctions' for having violated orders from Judge Paula Xinis, who has been handling the civil case from the start.
'Two things are now crystal clear,' the lawyers wrote. 'First, the government has always had the ability to return Abrego Garcia, but it has simply refused to do so. Second, the government has conducted a determined stalling campaign to stave off contempt sanctions long enough to concoct a politically face-saving exit from its own predicament.'
The filing came in response to a request to Judge Xinis from the Justice Department to pause all of the proceedings in the civil case as department lawyers prepared a motion to dismiss it altogether.
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