Judge rebukes Trump officials for not securing return of wrongly deported man [View all]

Source: the guardian



Administration will have to share under oath how it’s trying to get Kilmar Ábrego García back to US, says district judge

Hugo Lowell and Léonie Chao-Fong in Maryland Tue 15 Apr 2025 18.47 EDT

A federal judge sharply rebuked the Trump administration and scolded officials on Tuesday for taking no steps to secure the return of a man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, as the US supreme court had ordered in a contentious ruling last week.

The US district judge Paula Xinis said that Donald Trump’s news conference with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, where the leaders joked that Kilmar Ábrego García would not be released, did not count as compliance.

“To date nothing has been done,” Xinis said, a day after senior Trump officials also mounted an effort to sidestep the supreme court decision by offering increasingly strained readings of the order to claim they were powerless to bring back Ábrego García.The judge ultimately said she would require the administration to produce details under oath about its attempts to return Ábrego García to US soil in two weeks, an unusually expeditious timeline for discovery that indicated how she intends to move with the case.

At issue at the hearing in federal district court in Maryland was the administration’s narrow reading of the supreme court order that compelled it to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García, who was supposed to have been shielded from being sent to El Salvador..........................





Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/15/trump-administration-kilmar-abrego-garcia-deportation?CMP=share_btn_url