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The sharp rebuke by a federal judge in Maryland suggested that she had lost her patience with the Trump administration’s recalcitrance in the case.
- April 22, 2025Updated 7:18 p.m. ET
A federal judge in Maryland blasted the Trump administration on Tuesday for flouting her instructions to answer questions about what steps it had taken, and planned to take, in seeking the release of a Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador last month.
The sharp rebuke by the judge, Paula Xinis, contained in an eight-page order, suggested she had lost her patience with the Justice Department’s pattern of stonewalling her in the case involving the deported man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia.
In her order, Judge Xinis accused the department of “a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.” She also dismissed as “specious” its attempts to evade providing information about how Mr. Abrego Garcia ended up in a Salvadoran prison by claiming that it amounted to privileged state secrets that needed to be protected.
“For weeks, defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this court’s orders,” Judge Xinis wrote, giving vent to her frustrations. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote to Judge Xinis, accusing the government of “producing nothing of substance” in response to a list of 15 questions and 15 requests for documents that it had given to the Justice Department in an effort to determine what, if anything, the White House had done to free Mr. Abrego Garcia from Salvadoran custody.
The lawyers asked the judge to hold a hearing on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Maryland to decide how to proceed. But the judge, indicating that she had reached the end of her rope, skipped past a courtroom conversation altogether and simply told the government what it had done wrong.
