A federal judge repeatedly expressed frustration Friday at the Trump administration’s failure to answer her questions about what it is doing to facilitate the return of a Maryland resident wrongly deported to a notorious prison in his native El Salvador.

US District Judge Paula Xinis held a hearing to press Justice Department lawyers on whether the government can invoke legal privileges to avoid answering questions about its efforts to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the US. 

The judge is pushing President Donald Trump’s administration to comply with a US Supreme Court order on April 10 to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. Xinis has expressed frustration for weeks that he hasn’t been brought back to the US, while the case has come to symbolize Trump’s disdain for the courts amid the president’s mass deportations. 

Immigration officials conceded Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported on March 15, but Trump and his top advisers claimed they’re unable to bring him back. In recent days, they argued that “state secrets” and “deliberative process” privileges bar them from answering questions from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers. 

But on Friday, Xinis said that depositions submitted by the Department of Homeland Security failed to address the questions the judge had posed about facilitating Abrego Garcia’s return. 

“You can’t tell me that the depositions that I read are a good-faith effort,” Xinis said in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland.

The judge also said she can’t evaluate the US assertion of the states secret privilege, including by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, because the government hasn’t given her enough information to determine whether there is a reasonable danger to foreign affairs. 

‘Something to Review’

“I have to have something to review.” Xinis said. “Otherwise it is left to the caprice of the executive branch to tell me when evidence should be cut off in a case and we can’t have that either.” 

Justice Department attorney Jonathan Guynn protested, saying the government had provided ample information on every question posed by the judge. But Abrego Garcia lawyer Andrew Rossman said there is “zero evidence” in the record that the government is complying with the court’s orders. 

“A life is in the balance,” Rossman said. “We have due process in the balance.” 

After more than two-and-a-half hours of public arguments, Xinis then went into a closed-door session with the lawyers to discuss confidential matters raised by the government. She said she will issue an order on next steps in the case. 

Xinis had paused the case on April 23, after the Trump administration said it engaged in “appropriate diplomatic discussions” with El Salvador about Abrego Garcia. 

At the time, that marked a dramatic change in position after Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele had previously said they had no power to return Abrego Garcia to the US. Trump later said in an NBC interview on May 4 that he had the power to bring Abrego Garcia back but he wouldn’t do it because his advisers hadn’t told him that he should. 

Abrego Garcia was deported on March 15 despite a 2019 court order saying he couldn’t be sent to his native country. 

The administration says Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang and a dangerous criminal, but he was never charged with a crime and he denies being a gang member. He was initially kept in El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, but was later moved to another facility.

Xinis had given the US two weeks to answer wide-ranging questions in a lawsuit filed by Abrego Garcia over what it was doing to facilitate his return. The Trump administration filed an emergency motion to stop that discovery, but the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals denied its request in a blistering opinion by a conservative judge.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote on April 17. “It claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Wilkinson also said the US had “not so subtly” spurned the Supreme Court by adopting a narrow definition of “facilitate” that the government saw as akin to doing “essentially nothing.” Rather, he said, it was an “active verb” that required that “steps be taken.”

The case is J.G.G. v. Trump, 25-cv-766, US District Court, District of Columbia. 

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