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This is an adapted excerpt from the July 7 episode of “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
On Monday, Trump administration lawyers were taken apart during a federal court hearing in Maryland over the bizarre, bungled, seemingly lawless deportation of a man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
During that hourslong hearing, the same federal judge who ordered the government in April to bring Abrego back from prison in El Salvador became totally exasperated as Justice Department lawyers refused to give clear answers to her clear questions.
The judge became totally exasperated when Justice Department lawyers refused to give clear answers to her clear questions.
When the judge asked Jonathan Guynn, a lawyer for the Justice Department, what the government planned to do with Abrego if he was released from custody later next week, Guynn replied it had “two options.”
According to Guynn, the government could either “remove him to a third country” or “seek to revisit Abrego Garcia’s order of withholding of removal.”
When the judge asked Guynn which option it was likely to take, he said that the “current plan is to attempt to remove [Abrego] to a third country” but noted the government could reassess that plan. When Guynn reiterated that the administration had not made a final decision, the judge said she did not “buy that for a second.”
The back-and-forth continued as the judge pressed the administration about what third country it planned to send Abrego to. “I do not believe that has been determined yet,” Guynn said. “I think there's a number of countries with whom we have treaties and agreements ... and DHS would explore its options for removal closer to the time when they would be taking [Abrego] into custody.”
The judge then asked if the government had started the process of identifying a possible country. Another lawyer from the Justice Department intervened and said they did not have that information. The exchange, according to Lawfare’s Anna Bower, who was inside the courtroom, appeared to leave the judge confused.
Throughout that hearing, the lawyers for the Justice Department repeatedly refused to provide reasonable answers to some very straightforward questions.
The country of El Salvador has seemingly contradicted the Trump administration’s claims.
Although the Trump administration made it clear that it would very much like to deport Abrego again, for now he is here in the United States. He’s no longer being held at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, where he was sent earlier this year.
Yet the Trump administration has sent hundreds of other people to that prison in El Salvador. Time and again, the administration has insisted in court that it has no control over the immigrants who are now being held there and that it is impossible to return those individuals because they are under El Salvador’s control. El Salvador has authority over them — that has been the Trump administration line over and over again.
But on Monday, there was a major development on that front. According to a new filing in federal district court in Washington, D.C., the country of El Salvador has seemingly contradicted the Trump administration’s claim.
That filing, submitted by lawyers for men being held in the prison, includes a document indicating that, as The New York Times reports, “the government of El Salvador recently told the United Nations that it bears no legal responsibility for the men. The document, written in response to a U.N. inquiry examining some of the deportations, also claimed that the Salvadoran government was merely doing the United States’ bidding when it accepted the men into its prison system.”
The ACLU’s Lee Gelernt, who is the lead counsel in this case, told NBC News that “El Salvador has confirmed what we and everyone else understood: It is the United States that controls what happens to the Venezuelans languishing at CECOT. Remarkably, the U.S. government didn’t provide this information to us or the court.”