A Constitutional Clash In Three Acts
In three closely watched anti-immigration cases, the Trump administration continued its slo-mo constitutional defiance of the judicial branch …
Act I: Non-Responsiveness
Act II: Delay Shenanigans
Act III: Misdirection And Mischaracterization
Stone Cold Stonewalling
New details about the extent of the Trump administration’s stonewalling in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia were revealed in a court filing Thursday. After six weeks of what was originally supposed to be two weeks of expedited discovery, the government has provided virtually no meaningful discovery responses, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers report.
Normal discovery disputes would not usually be newsworthy, but this comes in the context of a contempt of court inquiry. The administration’s defiance on discovery and the associated gamesmanship cut against its already-dubious claims that it has complied with the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return – an order endorsed and echoed by the Supreme Court.
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After the Trump administration late Wednesday asked for an extension of the May 30 deadline by which all discovery is to be completed, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers filed a blistering response demonstrating how little discovery the government has produced so far. It was already clear from public filings that the government had offered witnesses for deposition who had little or no personal knowledge of the facts of the case, in contravention of the judge’s order. The precise details of that defiance are unclear because many filings remain under seal.
The new details show how desultory the government’s document production has been, too. As of two weeks ago, the government had only produced 34 actual documents. In the subsequent two weeks it was given in which to produce rolling discovery, it coughed up a total of one additional partial document, according to Abrego Garcia’s filing.
The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United States before it labeled them as terrorists and deported them, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data that has not been previously reported.’
President Donald Trump and his aides have branded the Venezuelans as “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters” and “the worst of the worst.” When multiple news organizations disputed those assertions with reporting that showed many of the deportees did not have criminal records, the administration doubled down. It said that its assessment of the deportees was based on a thorough vetting process that included looking at crimes committed both inside and outside the United States. But the government’s own data, which was obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and a team of journalists from Venezuela, showed that officials knew that only 32 of the deportees had been convicted of U.S. crimes and that most were nonviolent offenses, such as retail theft or traffic violations.
The data indicates that the government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
As for foreign offenses, our own review of court and police records from around the United States and in Latin American countries where the deportees had lived found evidence of arrests or convictions for 20 of the 238 men. Of those, 11 involved violent crimes such as armed robbery, assault or murder, including one man who the Chilean government had asked the U.S. to extradite to face kidnapping and drug charges there. Another four had been accused of illegal gun possession.
Venezuelans deported to El Salvador are increasingly seeing their cases dismissed, a development advocates claim is a way to complete their “disappearance” from the U.S. legal system and further complicate their return from imprisonment in the Central American country.
NBC News reported that at least 14 asylum cases have been dismissed over the past weeks. “It seems the government’s intention in dismissing these cases across the country is to complete the disappearance of people to El Salvador, to end their legal proceedings, and to act as though they weren’t here seeking asylum in the first place,” Lindsay Toczylowski, executive director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, told the outlet. She is representing Andry Hernandez Romero, who was involved in such a case before being sent to the CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador.
In reality, which still holds some influence in our aggressively-online world, there are about 11 million undocumented people in the U.S., total. And despite all-caps propaganda to the contrary, they as a class “have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens,” according to a 2020 study; they even commit fewer crimes, on average, than fully legal immigrants — those who came here “the right way.”
“Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes,” according to the research, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
That’s why Stephen [“Goebbels”] Miller is so mad: an administration that wants nothing more than to parade millions of brown bodies onto military aircraft and out of the country — a MAGA team that promised its voters nothing less than “mass deportations now” — is having a tough time actually finding the hardened criminals the last folks supposedly let in. In April, the Trump administration deported more than 17,200 people; that’s up 29% from a year but it’s far below the pace necessary to meet the stated goal of one million deportees a year (and per NBC News, more than half of those now in ICE detention have no criminal record whatsoever).
https://www.salon.com/2025/05/29/stephen-millers-deportation-machine-is-failing–and-hes-furious
So what’s the next step? Will the supreme court and lower courts hold the administration in contempt and enforce the contempt citations?
Trump and his Republican stooges in Congress apparently anticipated this. Hidden inside their Big Ugly Bill is a provision intended to block the courts from using contempt to enforce its orders. It reads:
“No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued …”
Translated: no federal court may enforce a contempt citation.
The measure would make most existing injunctions – in antitrust cases, police reform cases, school desegregation cases and others – unenforceable.
Its only purpose is to weaken the power of the federal courts.
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But the provision inside the bill that neuters the federal courts is even worse. It would remove the last remaining constraint on Trump, and thereby effectively end American democracy.
Van Hollen told Rubio, “I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you for Secretary of State.”
Rubio responded, “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.
Such a typical FU response from one of King Donald’s cronies.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has warned the Trump administration about its handling of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s case, a Salvadoran national mistakenly deported to El Salvador. Key officials have admitted ignorance about crucial details in court proceedings, raising concerns about compliance with the judge’s order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. Xinis has reportedly set a new compliance deadline and scheduled an in-person hearing.
Xinis said, “Evidently missing from the defendants’ filing is the privilege log that this court ordered to be produced.” She added, “Failure to file the privilege log or otherwise respond will be construed as an intentional refusal to comply with this court’s orders.”
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Xinis said, “You haven’t complied, and you haven’t in bad faith.”
Xinis has identified officials’ ignorance as noncompliance with her order to produce witnesses with direct knowledge of Abrego Garcia’s situation.
…Xinis stated, “The whole reason we’re here is because I’ve said repeatedly you’ve done nothing, and now you tell the world you’re not going to do anything.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/my-head-is-spinning-deportation-draws-backlash/ss-AA1FwI5y
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) slammed Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi [Bimbo #2] Noem for her recent trip to Israel, declaring it just another “photo op.”
Crockett said she didn’t think anything substantive would come from the foreign trip scheduled days after two Israeli Embassy staffers were fatally shot outside of a museum in Washington.
“You just had a good photo op. And I think that that’s probably all Kristi [Bimbo #2] Noem is good for, is a photo op,” Crockett said Sunday during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Weekends with Alex Witt.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5319575-jasmine-crockett-kristi-noem-israel-trip
More than two months after the Trump administration flew more than 200 people to a detention camp in El Salvador, there’s still a lot that remains unclear.
We still don’t know who, exactly, the government sent there. We don’t know how many people were aboard each plane that went from Texas to El Salvador on March 15; we don’t know who was removed under the wartime Alien Enemies Act, and who was removed under more standard immigration authorities. The question of whether non-citizens that the U.S. government is paying El Salvador to hold are entitled to habeas corpus protections is also, somewhat ominously, unanswered.
It’s shocking given the lawlessness of the operation: the Trump administration sought to shield these removals from judicial scrutiny from the start, and, per the finding of one federal judge, sought to delay a court hearing until the airplanes could depart for El Salvador.
A report published this week by the Cato Institute adds another egregious fact to this story: many of those sent to El Salvador entered the United States legally.
The researchers behind the study attempted to learn as much as they could about a list of 238 men rendered to CECOT, the El Salvador prison, on March 15, obtained and reported by CBS News. They found that at least 50 of the more than 200 men sent to El Salvador complied with U.S. immigration law as they entered the country.
Their resulting removal and indefinite confinement in El Salvador has been a betrayal, David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute and the author of the study, told TPM.
