Is The Pause In Abrego Garcia Case A Sign Of Progress?

Or more shenanigans?

Last night Judge Paula Xinis stayed discovery in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man renditioned to a Salvadoran gulag despite a court order barring it.

“With the agreement of the parties, the Court hereby ORDERS that discovery shall be stayed until April 30, 2025, at 5:00 PM,” she wrote in an order that appeared on the docket at 8:30PM.

STOP! RECORD SCRATCH! WTF just happened?

Well … we have no idea. There were two sealed motions on the docket yesterday and then nothing until the judge’s late night order. We think that the government probably made some kind of promise to do something to get Abrego Garcia home, and the court gave them a week to put up or shut up. But to understand why, we need to go back and talk about what happened in court over the past two weeks.

Jesus will not save you. And neither will Chief Justice Roberts.

Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The order contained some general harrumphing by the Supreme Court’s conservatives about the trial judge encroaching on executive power by ordering the government to “effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. But the implication was clear: the government should take the face-saving win and bring this guy back already.

Instead, the administration dug in and refused to cooperate. And when Judge Xinis ordered the government to engage in discovery, the Justice Department raced to the Fourth Circuit demanding that it countermand her. The appeals court slapped that down in a ruling so stinging that the government didn’t even bother to appeal it to the Supreme Court.

Which would have been the cue for any normal administration to pony up. But this is not a normal administration.

Is misquoting a Supreme Court order a sign of bad faith?

Asking for Justice Department lawyers Drew Ensign, Yaakov Roth, and Ernesto Molina, who did it three times in response to interrogatories posed by Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.