Lawyers for Returned Deportee Seek Sanctions Against Trump Officials
For the better part of two months, lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland immigrant who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, have been complaining loudly about the Trump administration's persistent efforts to dodge court orders instructing it to work toward freeing him from Salvadoran custody.
Their search for accountability continued even after the White House brought Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States last week — albeit to face an indictment that was investigated and filed while he was overseas.
But late on Wednesday night, the lawyers sent the federal judge handling the case their most detailed inventory yet of what they described as the administration's 'sustained and flagrant' violations. The lawyers also asked the judge, Paula Xinis, to do something about it. They said that they wanted her to appoint a special master to investigate the failure by Trump officials to comply with her instructions and to impose financial penalties, if warranted, as a punishment for contempt.
The 33-page filing by the lawyers contained a litany of purported wrongdoing by the Trump administration and accused officials in the Homeland Security and Justice Departments of throwing up evasions at every turn, harboring a disdain for the judicial process and, in one instance, potentially lying under oath.
It gave a strong flavor of the lawyers' frustration after almost two months of failing to get answers to the question of what the White House had been doing to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia's release before it suddenly changed course last Friday by bringing him back to face indictment.
'Nearly 60 days, 10 orders, three depositions, three discovery disputes, three motions for stay, two hearings, a weeklong stay and a failed appeal later,' the lawyers wrote, 'the plaintiffs still have seen no evidence to suggest that the defendants took any steps, much less 'all available steps,' to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return to the United States 'as soon as possible' so that his case could be handled as it would have been had he not been unlawfully deported.'
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