As legal claims against the Trump administration stack up, several federal lawyers defending the U.S. government — and its repeated failures to follow court orders — have regularly fallen back on the same argument: They simply have no idea what’s going on.
In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national and Maryland resident mistakenly deported last year, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis became so frustrated by government attorneys’ failure to answer basic questions that she considered holding them in contempt.
“We have said what we can say. I do not have that information,” the government’s lawyer, Drew Ensign, told Xinis at a protracted hearing on Abrego Garcia’s status last spring. Ensign’s lack of knowledge about Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts and what the administration had done to facilitate his release, Xinis said, suggested the government was “playing a game with their own lawyers.” In a later order, she slammed DOJ attorneys for their “willful bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations” and “specious” tactics to evade her questions. One year later, Abrego Garcia’s case is still not closed, and just last week, the government said it still intends to deport him.
