The Administration Is Playing Dumb

“To date nothing has been done,” federal Judge Paula Xinis told a lawyer with the Department of Justice (DOJ), rebuking them, referring to the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. “Nothing.”

The Supreme Court issued an unsigned decision this past Thursday instructing the Trump administration to facilitate the Salvadoran man’s return to the United States. “The order properly requires the Government 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,” said the ruling.

This has not happened. Now, Xinis is investigating why—and receiving rather dissatisfying responses from the administration and its lawyers.

“If Abrego Garcia presents himself at a port of entry,” DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign told Xinis at a hearing yesterday, “we will facilitate his entry to the United States.” This is an obnoxious and unserious response, as Abrego Garcia is currently locked up in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a maximum-security prison, and thus unable to board a freaking Avianca flight and roll up to customs at Dulles airport.

“There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding,” said Xinis at yesterday’s hearing, the start of a two-week inquiry into what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

Over the course of this inquiry, “four senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State will have to sit for depositions by April 23,” reports Politico, describing these as ”essentially out-of-court interviews in which the officials will have to answer questions under oath from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.”

Xinis summed up her thoughts on the government’s very passive stance toward complying with the Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return: “Defendants therefore remain obligated, at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Ensign playing dumb won’t cut it, in other words.

“The government has not even unambiguously requested his return,” one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said yesterday in court, adding that it’s not uncommon for the U.S. to do so in immigration cases. “The government routinely seeks return by taking low-level actions outside the United States that do not implicate foreign policy.”

“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Monday from the Oval Office, where he was meeting with President Donald Trump. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Vice President J.D. Vance took to X to call Abrego Garcia a “gang member.” Then multiple Fox News commentators sounded off on the case, with once-libertarian Greg Gutfeld saying “At worst, a guy gets sent to a country he doesn’t want to go to—you know what? I can live with that.”

That’s a wild way to describe Abrego Garcia being wrongly deported to CECOT, El Salvador’s worst and most brutal prison, despite a judge granting him withholding of removal in 2019, having found his fear of persecution in El Salvador credible and protecting him from exactly this fate. Now, he’s being tarred by Bukele, Vance, Trump, and their media helpers, called an MS-13 member when the only evidence we have to establish that comes from a police informant saying so and the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hoodie. Where’s the justice in that?

Now, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.)—who counts Abrego Garcia and his family as his constituents—is traveling to El Salvador to attempt to speak with him and report back to his family about his condition. “We were in the gray zone before this. But if the Trump administration continues to thumb its nose at the federal courts in this case we’re in, we’re clearly in constitutional crisis territory,” said Van Hollen.

JUST IN: Sen. Van Hollen says he is going to El Salvador tomorrow to see if he can talk to Abrego Garcia.

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney.bsky.social) 2025-04-15T23:02:59.039Z

Trump’s deporting “home-growns” plan: Useful thread from Cato expert David Bier, quoted in yesterday’s Roundup. (The origin of that 500-mile rule? The legislation Trump himself signed into law.)

In case you were wondering, the US code provides for incarceration by the Bureau of Prisons for anyone sentenced under federal law. And it needs to be as close as practicable to the prisoner’s primary residence and within 500 miles of that residence (rules out El Salvador). https://t.co/8ZLmNwYKRC pic.twitter.com/tUoKjVR0OI

— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) April 15, 2025

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Scenes from New York: Are we seriously going to have Mayor Andrew Cuomo? “Two influential New York City labor unions that backed Mayor Eric Adams in 2021 switched their support on Monday to former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, reflecting his growing dominance as the race for mayor accelerates,” reports The New York Times. The unions—the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council and Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union—have a combined 125,000 members and are (unfortunately) politically important within New York City.

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QUICK HITS

• Is it possible that an anti-war faction within Defense Department was responsible for the leak?

Scoop! Dan Caldwell, a senior advisor to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, has been placed on administrative leave for an “unauthorized disclosure,” a U.S. official says.

Story coming.

This comes after a March 21 memo ordering a Pentagon investigation into leaks ordered by…

— Phil Stewart (@phildstewart) April 15, 2025

• This is bad, as Reuters and the Associated Press tend to be relatively reliable, with less spin than places like The Washington Post:

The White House announced Tuesday that it was eliminating the traditional press pool access for wire services after a federal court ordered the administration to end viewpoint discrimination against the Associated Press.https://t.co/i5gU1t9CbW

— Josh Wingrove (@josh_wingrove) April 16, 2025

• “[Financial authorities] should have three priorities [to maintain market stability]: Identify the weakest links, keep markets functioning as smoothly as possible, and provide solvent firms with ample access to cash, so they won’t dump assets or fail unnecessarily,” argue Bloomberg writers.
• “The United Kingdom’s highest court ruled on Wednesday that the definition of a woman under equality legislation referred to ‘biological sex,’” reports Reuters. Sanity, at long last.
• Long, sad piece about Elon Musk’s desire to use his sperm and the eggs of various women he finds to create a “‘legion’ [of children], a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire.”
• Lots of discourse online about this article by Stephanie Murray, writing for Slate. I, of course, have done this (thread here):

Easily the strangest reporting experience of my life, but for @Slate, I attempted to make sense of the furor that met Matt & Abby Howard last year, when it seemed they’d left their kids sleeping in a cruise cabin while eating dinner & monitoring the kids via Facetime. pic.twitter.com/SRh2isSCZx

— Stephanie H. Murray (@stephmurrayyyy) April 15, 2025

• And, lest you still have hunger for more parenting and babymaking discourse, here’s an Elizabeth Bruenig piece in The Atlantic on the many weirdos at Natal Conference. To my mind, the factions she identifies within pronatalism—the tech and the trad—are broadly correct. But we’re sorely in need of a normie wing: people who are just…extremely reasonable about it all, interested in changing parenting culture so that it’s less onerous and judgmental, and focused on emphasizing more of the benefits of having larger families.
• Yesterday was theft day. Here’s the iconic Donald Rumsfeld letter to the Internal Revenue Service:

Happy Donald Rumsfeld IRS letter day to all who celebrate ???? pic.twitter.com/jN9t2GConu

— Emily Domenech (@ehdomenech) April 15, 2025

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