Trump Takes Big Step Towards Defying Court Orders in Garcia Abrego Case
When the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump Administration must “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran migrant illegally deported to imprisonment in El Salvador, I noted it was an important victory for immigrant rights, but also warned the administration might try to weasel its way out of compliance by applying a very narrow definition of “facilitate” that licenses near-total inaction. Sadly, this is exactly what happened.
When the case was remanded back to the district court, Judge Paula Xinis issued an order instructing the defendants to “take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible.” The government indefensibly interpreted this as merely requiring it to remove “domestic” obstacles to his return, making no effort to get the Salvadoran government to release him from prison. That makes no sense in a context where the Salvadorans had imprisoned Abrego Garcia at the behest of the US, and the Trump Administration could easily secure his release simply by demanding it. As conservative legal commentator Ed Whelan puts it: “The administration is clearly acting in bad faith… The Supreme Court and the district court have properly given it the freedom to select the means by which it will undertake to ensure Abrego Garcia’s return. The administration is abusing that freedom by doing basically nothing.”
The Administration coupled this bad-faith failure to follow the Supreme Court’s and district court’s orders with unsubstantiated claims that Abrego Garcia was a member of the MS 13 drug gang. They have no evidence for that. And if they did, the proper course of action is to charge him with it in court, rather than deportation and imprisonment without due process.
Judge Xinis appears to agree with Whelan’s assessment. In an order issued today, she chastizes the the Administrat
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