24 Apr 2025

Judge Slams Government Stonewalling about Abrego Garcia

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Federal District Court Judge Paula Xinis reached the end of her patience with lawyers for Donald Trump’s regime for stonewalling instead of complying with orders from herself and the Supreme Court to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador.

A discovery period is currently underway which will help Xinis determine whether to hold the government in contempt of court, and if so, exactly which people are responsible. Government lawyers have been raising objections and vaguely claiming privileges.

Government lawyers claimed some discovery requests are based on “false premise that the United States can or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Xinis quoted the Supreme Court’s order to them. She prefaced it by saying “the falsehood lies not in any supposed ‘premise,’ but in their continued mischaracterization of the Supreme Court’s Order.” She said their “objection reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations” and overruled the objection.

Xinis also rejected their vague invocations of privilege. She wrote “Defendants invoke in name only a range of protections—attorney-client privilege, the work-product doctrine, the deliberative process privilege, the state secrets privilege, and an undefined “governmental privilege”—without providing any supporting information or analysis. [….] [T]he proponent of a privilege must demonstrate the legal and factual bases to invoke the protections that such privilege affords.” She set a deadline of 24 hours for government lawyers to list the specific privileges they wish to apply and justify invoking them. “If Defendants want to preserve their privilege claims, they must support them with the required detail. Otherwise, they will lose the protections they failed to properly invoke.”

Most of the rest of the filing went no better for government lawyers. Xinis repeatedly used the phrase “bad faith” to describe their conduct.

It is not clear what will happen if Trump’s lawyers continue to defy Xinis and the Supreme Court.

Click here to read the filing.