New Details Emerge On Trump Administration's Defiance Of The Courts

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3 days ago

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
New details about the extent of the Trump administration's stonewalling in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia were revealed in a court filing Thursday. After six weeks of what was originally supposed to be two weeks of expedited discovery, the government has provided virtually no meaningful discovery responses, Abrego Garcia's lawyers report.
Normal discovery disputes would not usually be newsworthy, but this comes in the context of a contempt of court inquiry. The administration's defiance on discovery and the associated gamesmanship cut against its already-dubious claims that it has complied with the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return – an order endorsed and echoed by the Supreme Court.
Judge Xinis had ordered the discovery into Abrego Garcia's status and what the government had done and planned to do to facilitate his release from imprisonment in his native El Salvador for two reasons: (i) to pressure the Trump administration to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate his return; and (ii) to determine whether the administration had violated her order with sufficient bad faith to constitute contempt of court.
After the Trump administration late Wednesday asked for an extension of the May 30 deadline by which all discovery is to be completed, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a blistering response demonstrating how little discovery the government has produced so far. It was already clear from public filings that the government had offered witnesses for deposition who had little or no personal knowledge of the facts of the case, in contravention of the judge's order. The precise details of that defiance are unclear because many filings remain under seal.
The new details show how desultory the government's document production has been, too. As of two weeks ago, the government had only produced 34 actual documents. In the subsequent two weeks it was given in which to produce rolling discovery, it coughed up a total of one additional partial document, according to Abrego Garcia's filing.
'This is far from a good faith effort to comply with court ordered discovery. It is reflective of a pattern of deliberate delay and bad faith refusal to comply with court orders,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued in opposing the extension request. 'The patina of promises by Government lawyers to do tomorrow that which they were already obligated to do yesterday has worn thin.'
Abrego Garcia's lawyers say the government document production has included what they characterize as 'makeweight,' non-responsive copies of existing filings in the case and of other publicly available materials that aren't new or pertinent. 'Zero documents produced to Plaintiffs to date reflect any efforts made to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return to the United States,' they say (emphasis theirs).
Judge Xinis wasn't buying it either.
'Assertions of diligence notwithstanding, Defendants have offered no explanation as to why they could not produce any additional documents on a rolling basis, as they had agreed could be accomplished during the May 16, 2025 hearing,' Xinis wrote yesterday when she denied the administration's request to extend the discovery deadline.
In addition to the paucity of document production, the government has still not fully responded to the limited set of interrogatories that the judge approved for the expedited discovery, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say.
The Trump DOJ lawyers have also engaged in low-rent gamesmanship, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. While the government told the court that it had attempted to confer with them about the request to extend the deadline, in fact the DOJ lawyers reached out at 11:35 p.m. and filed their request an hour later without waiting for Abrego Garcia's lawyers to respond.
'This is hardly a good faith attempt to obtain Plaintiffs' position,' Xinis observed in a footnote.
Petty gamesmanship aside, the constitutional and real-world implications of the Abrego Garcia case remain enormous. The pace of the defiance has slowed since the flurry of activity in mid-March, but the constitutional clash is no less real now that it was then.
'[T]he Government has engaged in a pattern of intentional stonewalling and obfuscation—all in service of delaying the inevitable conclusion, which is that it has not done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return,' his lawyers concluded in their latest filing. 'More time will not change this, but it will multiply the prejudice to Abrego Garcia, who remains in unlawful custody in El Salvador.'
The big constitutional clashes are happening in anti-immigration cases where the underlying facts are often less important than the Trump administration's conduct in court, which can be hard for laypeople to follow. The action (and often inaction) can devolve into complicated procedural maneuvering and legal arguments, so the challenge in covering these cases is to find ways to breathe life into them because they're so important:
In one of the best pieces I've read in a while, Adam Unikowsky unpacks the Alien Enemies Act case out of Texas that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and which appears to be a likely vehicle for the big decisions it will make on the AEA.
Steve Vladeck unravels the third country deportations case out of Massachusetts which didn't seem nearly as urgent as the AEA cases until the Trump administration started its extreme shenanigans.
President Trump has gone after the courts, his own judicial appointees, the Federalist Society, and now his Supreme Court whisperer Leonard Leo.
NYT: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans
Passing through Nashville last night, I caught a freewheeling set of mostly Beatles covers by the bluegrass band Greenwood Rye. Here's a recent sampling (with a different lineup of musicians):