Judges in deportation cases face evasion and delay from Trump administration

Boston Globe

2 days ago

All of this first came to the fore when Judge Paula Xinis opened an investigation in mid-April into whether Trump officials had violated her order to 'facilitate' the release of a Maryland man who had been wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador.
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In a sternly worded ruling in U.S. District Court in Maryland, Xinis instructed the Justice Department to tell her what steps the White House had taken, and planned to take, to free the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, from Salvadoran custody. And she wanted answers quickly, declaring that her inquiry would take only two weeks.
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That was seven weeks ago, and lawyers for Abrego Garcia say they are no closer now than they were then to understanding why their client was sent to El Salvador or what the government has done to fix what officials have acknowledged was an 'administrative error.'
Instead, the lawyers say, the Justice Department has hidden what it knows about Abrego Garcia's deportation behind repeated claims of privilege. They have also said that the department has offered witnesses for depositions who have little firsthand knowledge of the case and has sought at every turn to slow-walk disclosing documents and responding to questions.
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'It is reflective of a pattern of deliberate delay and bad faith refusal to comply with court orders,' they wrote in a filing late last week. 'The patina of promises by government lawyers to do tomorrow that which they were already obligated to do yesterday has worn thin.'
Such recalcitrance has left lawyers in the Justice Department who are working on these cases in a difficult position. Several times during hearings in the past few months, the lawyers have had to admit to federal judges that their 'clients' in agencies like the Department of Homeland Security have simply refused to provide the information they were asked for.
After one of those lawyers, Erez Reuveni, admitted to Xinis during a hearing in April that he was frustrated by how he could not fully answer her questions, the Justice Department responded to his candor by suspending and then firing him. His dismissal prompted a spate of resignations from the department's Office of Immigration Litigation, which has effectively been hollowed out by the administration's give-no-ground approach.
In many ways, the intransigent tactics used in these deportation cases echo those employed by the defense lawyers who represented Trump in the four criminal cases he faced before he was reelected. In those cases, only one of which survived to go to trial, the lawyers used every means at their disposal to gum up the works: They challenged minor matters, filed appeals at every turn and repeatedly asked judges for delays.
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Two of those lawyers, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove III, now occupy top positions in the Justice Department. Last week, Trump said he would nominate Bove to be an appeals court judge.
It remains unclear for now how Xinis intends to handle the department's stubbornness in Abrego Garcia's case, but the tensions could soon come to a head.
Just last week, one day before it was supposed to submit its final answers to her questions, the administration asked for a two-week extension, saying that lawyers for the Justice Department had 'expended significant resources' going through the materials she requested.
Responding to her demands, the lawyers wrote, had been 'extremely burdensome,' especially, they noted, because the department — the government equivalent of a giant white-shoe law firm — was hindered by 'limited staff available for document review.'
Xinis denied the request on the same day it was made.
She is not the only judge to have faced obstructions by the Trump administration.
One day after Xinis began her investigation in Maryland, a federal judge in Washington, James E. Boasberg, threatened to open a similar inquiry into a violation of an order he had issued in a different deportation case. In that case, Boasberg said he was considering contempt proceedings to punish the administration for failing to comply with his instructions in March to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.
One week later, another federal judge in Maryland, Stephanie A. Gallagher, issued a ruling that echoed what Xinis had decided in the Abrego Garcia case. Gallagher told the Trump administration to 'facilitate' the return of a different immigrant — a young Venezuelan man known only as Cristian — who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador on the same set of flights as Abrego Garcia.
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But in the days that followed, Gallagher confronted a familiar pattern of evasion and delay.
First, the judge looked on as the Justice Department lost its bid to have a federal appeals court put her order on hold. Then, in the wake of that defeat, she ordered the administration to give her an update on the steps it had taken to seek Cristian's release.
When the Justice Department filed its update last week (late, as it turned out), it was largely based on a declaration by a federal immigration official that included no new details about the case. The declaration merely repeated facts that everyone already knew: that Cristian was in the custody of El Salvador and that homeland security officials had asked the State Department for help in complying with the judge's initial order.
Displeased by all of this, Gallagher fired off a new decision Wednesday, accusing the administration of having 'utterly disregarded' her order for an update.
She gave Trump officials until 5 p.m. Monday to send another version. And just before that deadline, the Justice Department filed a new declaration from the same immigration official, asserting that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was 'personally handling discussions with the government of El Salvador' concerning Cristian.
'Secretary Rubio has read and understands this court's order,' the declaration said, 'and wants to assure this court that he is committed to making prompt and diligent efforts on behalf of the United States to comply with that order.'
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But in a dueling submission to Gallagher, Cristian's lawyers said the Trump administration had yet to take any steps to bring their client back. The lawyers asked her to hold a hearing with testimony from 'key decision maker(s)' as to why and to punish officials, if needed, with a finding of contempt.
Less than two weeks ago, a federal judge in Boston, Brian E. Murphy, said he might seek contempt sanctions against the administration after determining that Trump officials had violated one of his orders by putting a group of immigrants on a deportation flight to Africa with less than one day's notice.
In April, Murphy expressly forbade such a move, issuing a ruling that barred officials from deporting people to countries not their own without first giving them a 'meaningful opportunity' to object.
Murphy stopped short of following the path his colleagues took and ordering the government to 'facilitate' the return of the deported men. Instead, he took the advice of a Justice Department lawyer who suggested the administration could fix the problem it had created by providing the men with hearings in Africa at which they could challenge their removal.
Not surprisingly, Murphy seemed a bit confused and more than a little outraged just days later when department lawyers asked him to reconsider this solution, claiming that he had imposed it on the White House and that it was more cumbersome than they had initially imagined.
Murphy had to remind the lawyers that the whole proposal had been their idea, not his.
'Defendants have mischaracterized this court's order,' he wrote last week, 'while at the same time manufacturing the very chaos they decry.'
This article originally appeared in
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