Court Allows Government To Continue Stalling While Abrego Garcia Remains In Hell

Abrego Garcia is being held incommunicado in a foreign torture camp. As far as anyone knows, he has no idea that he is the subject of a Supreme Court ruling and a high-profile legal battle to get him home. He likely doesn’t even know if his family, or anyone else, knows where he is. We don’t know for sure either, as the government has refused to provide any official update on his whereabouts.

I think those are important facts to keep in mind when considering today’s ruling (which should be released in written form soon) in the District Court of Maryland, which allows the government to continue stalling and saying nothing, so long as they do so via daily updates.

Update: The written order (pdf) has now been released.

To recap: as we wrote about this morning, yesterday the Supreme Court ruled that DHS must comply with the district court order to “facilitate” Garcia’s release and to provide information on his current location, their efforts so far, and their plans to do so going forward. Judge Paula Xinis then quickly updated her original order with a tight deadline of early this morning, then granted a two-hour extension. The government’s lawyers missed the deadline then filed a late response, refusing to comply with the order on the basis that they were unable to do so.

This was all in the lead-up to a brief, tense hearing earlier this afternoon. The DOJ attorney repeatedly told Judge Xinis, who reporters say was visibly frustrated, that the administration is “not yet prepared” to share any information, and that they “disagree fundamentally” on the status of the court’s order.

After Xinis told the government “we’re not going to slow-walk this”, Garcia’s lawyers then made what seems like an entirely appropriate request: that the judge order administration officials with personal knowledge of Garcia’s whereabouts to appear before the court and testify:

But the judge was apparently not prepared to do so. Instead, she promised an order for daily status updates from the government on what they were doing to facilitate Garcia’s release. When the DOJ attorney called this “impractical”, Judge Xinis replied that then they can “say that every day” in their status updates:

Maybe that’s not “slow-walking”, but it sure as hell isn’t sprinting either. The Trump administration is not cowed by the prospect of having to report their lack of effort to the public — they have been openly boasting about Garcia’s deportation and imprisonment this entire time, and mocking all those (including Judge Xinis) who demand his return. And yet she has effectively invited them to continue stalling and stonewalling the court, as long as it’s on a fixed schedule.

When it comes to this administration, on this appalling case, I can’t think of many words a judge could utter that are more weak and worthless than “I hope you will in good faith comply”.

The door is not closed on further action from the court, and there will be another hearing next week. Until then, Abrego Garcia remains (as far as we know) unaware that any of this is happening, locked up in a Salvadoran prison designed to snuff out his humanity and make him resign himself to spending the rest of his life there, under the jurisdiction of a government that has taken the official position that he is a terrorist never to be released, led by a dictator who callously mocked the idea that he ever would be.

I doubt it would bring him much comfort to know that the Trump administration is now required to issue a daily statement about their indifference to, or indeed their celebration of, his situation.

And as long as we’re remembering that, let’s remember something else too: Garcia is just one of at least 238 men who have been trafficked, without due process, into this same fate. Almost none of them have any criminal record; many seem to have been declared gang members based on unrelated tattoos that indicate no gang affiliation.

Among them are Andry Hernandez, a hairdresser and makeup artist who was legally applying for asylum and was later, by total coincidence, witnessed by a photographer calling out for his mother and being brutalized during his admission to the CECOT torture camp in El Salvador; and Neri Avarado, a Dallas bakery worker who was declared a gang member on the basis of an autism awareness tattoo dedicated to his autistic brother; and Zambrano Perez, father of an asylum-seeking family, who has never seen his two-month old daughter since she was born after he was kidnapped by ICE over a tattoo of a crown he got when he was 15 years old; and Artuo Suarez and Jerce Reyes Barrios, both of whom entered the US through legal channels and were, again, kidnapped on the basis of tattoos (and, in Barrios’s case, a blurry photo of him as a 13-year-old making a “rock and roll” hand gesture).

Some of these men’s families only know where they are being held because they spotted them in media photos of prisoners being frogmarched through the halls of CECOT; many of the families don’t even have that; none of the families have any idea if they will ever come home. Every day — every hour — that this continues is an hour the US government is committing a brutal crime of the highest order.

But oh well, I guess officials get another day, and another day after that, and who knows how many more days, to even admit they know where he is.