The Administration Is Playing Dumb
“To date nothing has been done,” federal Judge Paula Xinis told a lawyer with the Department of Justice (DOJ), rebuking them, referring to the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. “Nothing.”
The Supreme Court issued an unsigned decision this past Thursday instructing the Trump administration to facilitate the Salvadoran man’s return to the United States. “The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” said the ruling.
This has not happened. Now, Xinis is investigating why—and receiving rather dissatisfying responses from the administration and its lawyers.
“If Abrego Garcia presents himself at a port of entry,” DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign told Xinis at a hearing yesterday, “we will facilitate his entry to the United States.” This is an obnoxious and unserious response, as Abrego Garcia is currently locked up in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a maximum-security prison, and thus unable to board a freaking Avianca flight and roll up to customs at Dulles airport.
“There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding,” said Xinis at yesterday’s hearing, the start of a two-week inquiry into what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.
Over the course of this inquiry, “four senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State will have to sit for depositions by April 23,” reports Politico, describing these as “essentially out-of-court interviews in which the officials will have to answer questions under oath from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.”
Xinis summed up her thoughts on the government’s very passive stance toward complying with the Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return: “Defendants therefore remain obligated, at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Ensign playing dumb won’t cut it, in other words.
“The government has not even unambiguously requested his return,” one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said yesterday in court, adding that it’s not uncommon for the U.S. to do so in immigration cases. “The government routinely seeks return by taking low-level actions outside the United States that do not implicate foreign policy.”
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Monday from the Oval Office, where he was meeting with President Donald Trump. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Vice President J.D. Vance took to X to call Abrego Garcia a “gang member.” Then multiple Fox News commentators sounded off on the case, with once-libertarian Greg Gutfeld saying “At worst, a guy gets sent to a country he doesn’t want to go to—you know what? I can live with that.”
That’s a wild way to describe Abrego Garcia being wrongly deported to CECOT, El Salvador’s worst and most brutal prison, despite a judge granting him withholding of removal in 2019, having found his fear of persecution in El Salvador credible and protecting him from exactly this fate. Now, he’s being tarred
Article from Reason.com
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