What dictators do
Trump and co are blowing off the courts.
The Trump administration on Friday defied a federal judge’s order to provide an explanation for how it intended to bring back to the United States a Maryland man who was unlawfully deported to El Salvador last month.
In an aggressive two-page filing, Justice Department lawyers told the judge, Paula Xinis, that she had not given them enough time to figure out what they planned to do about the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, after the Supreme Court ordered the administration on Thursday to “facilitate” his return to U.S. soil.
“Defendants are unable to provide the information requested by the court on the impracticable deadline set by the court hours after the Supreme Court issued its order,” the department lawyers wrote.
“In light of the insufficient amount of time afforded to review the Supreme Court order,” the lawyers went on, “defendants are not in a position where they ‘can’ share any information requested by the court. That is the reality.”
…
The dispute emerged directly from a Supreme Court ruling issued on Thursday evening in which the justices directed Trump officials to take steps to free Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran migrant, from a prison in El Salvador where he was sent with scores of other migrants on March 15.
The officials have already acknowledged that they made an “administrative error” when they put Mr. Abrego Garcia on the plane, despite a previous court order that had expressly prohibited sending him back to his homeland.
Ignoring a court order is not an “administrative error.”
In an order of her own, Judge Xinis gave the government until 11:30 a.m. Friday to file a written version of its plans, but refused to change the schedule for the hearing.
Clearly frustrated, she reminded the Justice Department that the administration’s “act of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was wholly illegal from the moment it happened.”
Moreover, she said the department’s request for additional time to study a four-page Supreme Court order “blinks at reality.”
We’re gamboling way too close to the edge of the cliff.
They are hoping that by the time they have got round to doing something (if they ever do), Abrego Garcia will have been permanently disappeared. The other matters that the case of Abrego Garcia raises is that none of those men deported to El Salvador were given due process (which they all should have been), that there are other known people who were certainly not members of any Venezuelan gang, and that there are almost certainly a great any more who were not.