“It’s going to be two weeks of intense discovery,” Xinis told Justice Department attorneys at the hearing.

Justice Department lawyers have repeatedly bucked Xinis’s orders to provide information about what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate the return of Abrego García, 29. That tone of defiance was underscored earlier this week by both President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during his visit to the White House, where he and Trump administration officials repeated unsubstantiated claims that the sheet metal apprentice who fled El Salvador as a teenager has ties to a transnational gang.

“There is never going to be a world in which this is an individual who’s going to live a peaceful life in Maryland, because he is a foreign terrorist and a MS-13 gang member,” White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday, echoing those claims hours before the hearing.

In a status report filed Tuesday, the Justice Department said the Department of Homeland Security has established processes to remove domestic obstacles that would otherwise prevent a foreign national from lawfully entering the United States.

“DHS is prepared to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s presence in the United States in accordance with those processes if he presents at a port of entry,” Justice Department attorney Joseph N. Mazzara said in the report. “I have been authorized to represent that if Abrego Garcia does present at a port of entry, he would become subject to detention by DHS. In that case, DHS would take him into custody in the United States and either remove him to a third country or terminate his withholding of removal because of his membership in MS-13, a designated foreign terrorist organization, and remove him to El Salvador.”

Xinis’s directive to provide information was backed by an order from the Supreme Court decision on Thursday that said the judge had properly ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego García’s return and added that the government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” to carry out the lower court’s order.

The administration has claimed the Supreme Court’s ruling as a victory, focusing on a line in the 9-0 decision that instructs the federal court in Maryland to act with “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Given that deference, the high court expressed concern about Xinis’s instruction to “effectuate” Abrego García’s return, but said Xinis’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”

Federal officials have said the Supreme Court’s decision required only that the administration allow Abrego García to return should he be released by the government of El Salvador, not that they take steps to encourage El Salvador’s government to free him from its Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison where as many as 70 inmates share a cell that is infamous for its harsh conditions.

During his White House visit Monday, Bukele said he would not release Abrego García.

“The question is preposterous,” said Bukele as he sat next to Trump. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

The case has hinged on the administration’s claims that Abrego García has ties to a clique of MS-13 that is based in Upstate New York, a place where Xinis has noted Abrego García has never lived.

Trump administration officials have pointed to an immigration detention hearing in 2019 at which a judge declined to immediately release Abrego García because of gang-related allegations supplied by a police detective in Maryland’s Prince George’s County who, according to police sources, was later indicted for giving confidential case information to a commercial sex worker whom he was paying for sex.

The former detective, Ivan Mendez, pleaded guilty and received probation, according to court records. Efforts to reach Mendez on Tuesday were unsuccessful.

In Abrego García’s immigration case, the judge ordered him held pending a full hearing months later, at which a different judge ruled in his favor. That judge ordered him released and prohibited the U.S. government from sending him back to El Salvador — a humanitarian protection called “withholding of removal.”

Abrego García’s lawyers say he has no criminal record in the United States or in El Salvador, which he fled when he was 16 years old to escape a gang’s extortion attempts.

Jasmine Hilton contributed to this report.

This is a developing story.