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The Trump administration escalated its defiance of federal court orders over the weekend, adamantly refusing to reverse its illegal deportation of a Maryland father, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, to an El Salvador prison. Across multiple filings, Justice Department lawyers flouted a judge’s directive to explain how the government intended to bring back Abrego Garcia—and denied that it had a duty to return him to the United States at all. Instead, the administration disclaimed any real responsibility to help the man, impudently misconstruing a Supreme Court decision compelling it to do just that. The government capped off this aggressive disobedience by submitting what appears to be a brazen lie to the court, claiming—implausibly and without evidence—that it had retroactively made Abrego Garcia’s deportation lawful. And it refused to turn over information that could allegedly bolster its dubious allegations on the grounds that it is all classified.

On Monday morning, top officials backed up the Justice Department’s startling claims during a White House visit by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested that he could disregard court orders directing the return of Abrego Garcia. Attorney General Pam Bondi said it was “not up to us” whether he is brought home. Bukele then announced that he would not send Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., saying: “Of course I’m not going to do it.”

This sneering resistance to the judiciary’s intervention was both entirely predictable and profoundly ominous. From the start, the U.S. government’s behavior in this case has been a conscience-shocking breach of both laws and norms that once stood as a firewall to safeguard all of our civil liberties. And it is now spiraling out of control. In a matter of days, Justice Department lawyers and administration officials have burned through basic legal duties in defense of a hideously unlawful scheme that seeks to permanently render innocent people to a black site. They have torched their credibility by violating the most fundamental obligations of candor to a court—not hesitantly, but proudly so, with undisguised disdain toward judges attempting to salvage whatever remains of the rule of law.

Calling this a constitutional crisis undersells the catastrophic implications of the emergency. This administration is rapidly constructing a legal framework that would allow it to abruptly disappear anyone, including natural-born U.S. citizens, to a foreign prison forever, for any reason it chooses, or no reason at all. Indeed, Trump teased this possibility on Monday, floating the deportation of “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador next. The stakes of the battle over Abrego Garcia’s fate could not be more evident: If the government succeeds in thwarting judicial repudiation of his deportation, it will mark the end of constitutional freedoms as we know them.

The outline of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s story is itself an indictment of this administration’s utter disregard for the rights and humanity of those it seeks to banish. A native of El Salvador, Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. in 2011 fleeing gang violence. An immigration judge granted him protected status in 2019, forbidding his removal to El Salvador due to the persecution he faced there. He is now married to a U.S. citizen, with whom he has a 5-year-old son, and he has never been accused of breaking any laws. In March, immigration officials nonetheless arrested Abrego Garcia, falsely accusing him of affiliation with a gang and claiming, incorrectly, that he had lost his protected status. Before he had any real opportunity to contest his detention, the government swiftly deported him to the notorious CECOT mega-prison in El Salvador. It then admitted that officials deported him by mistake but claimed it had no power or obligation to bring him back. U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis rejected these arguments, directing the government to “facilitate” and “effectuate” his return. The Justice Department asked SCOTUS to halt Xinis’ order.

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On Thursday, the Supreme Court delivered a mixed decision. It ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, acknowledging that his expulsion there was “illegal.” And it instructed the government to “share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” to bring him home. But it also declared that the judiciary could not force the government to “effectuate” his return out of “due regard for the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” This formalist compromise was seemingly intended to save face for the Trump administration and prevent the district court from superintending negotiations over Abrego Garcia while still mandating his return.

Predictably, however, the Justice Department has not interpreted the Supreme Court’s decision that way. Instead, it has read the order in extreme bad faith. Hours after SCOTUS ruled, Xinis ordered the government to provide an update on its efforts “to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s immediate return.” Justice Department attorneys Yaakov Roth and Drew Ensign refused to comply on Friday, demanding an extension instead. Xinis extended the deadline and gave them another chance. Roth and Ensign once again refused to comply, crudely stonewalling her demand for information. Xinis ruled that the Justice Department had defied her order and demanded daily status updates in the case; she insisted upon “a declaration made by an individual with personal knowledge” about the government’s efforts to bring him home.

Over the weekend, Roth and Ensign continued to flout Xinis’ directives. A Saturday status report failed to explain what steps the government was taking to return Abrego Garcia—with the implication that it was doing nothing at all. A Sunday status report did the same, with a perverse addition: The Justice Department abruptly claimed that it had somehow revoked Abrego Garcia’s protected status by accusing him of membership in MS-13 and designating the gang a “foreign terrorist organization.” In reality, immigration officials cannot unilaterally revoke this status; they must go through a legal process that has, by all appearances, not been undertaken here. So there is every reason to believe this claim is a lie. (Moreover, neither declaration appears to have been filed by “an individual with personal knowledge” of Abrego Garcia’s situation, as required by Xinis.)

In an accompanying filing, Roth and Ensign took their defiance one step further: They announced that, in the Justice Department’s view, the government has no affirmative obligation to return Abrego Garcia. Its duty to “facilitate” his return, they wrote, simply means that it must not stop him from coming back to the United States. The Supreme Court’s order, they continued, “is thus best read” as requiring the government “to remove any domestic obstacles that would otherwise impede” his “ability to return here.” SCOTUS’s order, according to Roth and Ensign, does not compel the government to take any active steps to ensure that Abrego Garcia comes back. “No other reading of ‘facilitate’ is tenable—or constitutional—here,” they concluded.

At the same time, Roth and Ensign rejected a request from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to review the legal agreement that allows the U.S. to use CECOT as a black site for immigrants. This agreement, of course, could shine light on the U.S. government’s authority to seek the return of individuals imprisoned there. But Roth and Ensign refused to let the court or the plaintiff’s lawyers see it. Any such agreement, they wrote, is “classified,” and likely “subject to the protections of attorney-client privilege and the State Secrets privilege.” So neither Xinis nor Abrego Garcia’s legal team can learn anything about the arrangement beyond what the government volunteers.

The Justice Department’s interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision would be laughable if it weren’t so chilling. Although the court used regrettably antiseptic language, the thrust of its ruling was clear: The government must take “further steps” to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, and “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” Yes, the court added the caveat that Xinis could not personally supervise negotiations with a foreign sovereign. But this language cannot plausibly be read to absolve the government of the central duty imposed upon it by the Supreme Court: to get Abrego Garcia out of CECOT. The Justice Department’s inane interpretation of SCOTUS’s order would render it incoherent, contradictory, and self-defeating—a mandate for the government to do, quite literally, nothing at all. No ethical attorney would affix their name to this duplicitous filing. And no amount of perfidious wordplay can obscure the fact the Trump administration now stands in open defiance of a Supreme Court order.

Xinis has not responded to the Justice Department’s weekend antics. But she now faces an unenviable set of options. The judge has every right and reason to threaten contempt of court for DOJ lawyers and administration officials for disobedience. But it appears that they are taking their orders from the top: On Monday morning, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller boasted that the administration has no intention of bringing back Abrego Garcia, claiming “this was the right person sent to the right place.” And on Saturday, Donald Trump himself posted that immigrants imprisoned at CECOT are “in the sole custody” of “a sovereign nation,” with “their future” entirely dependent on El Salvador President Nayib Bukele. Trump and Miller seem to be signaling that, in their view, they need not—in fact, cannot—order Abrego Garcia’s return; his fate lies entirely in the hands of Bukele. (Trump hosted Bukele at the White House on Monday, a photo op that gives the lie to any claim that Abrego Garcia’s fate is out of his hands.)

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It is critical to remember that although the Trump administration is testing out this legal strategy on an immigrant, there is no legal principle that restricts the plan to noncitizens. The Justice Department’s current position, if ratified by the courts, would allow the government to send any American citizen to CECOT, then refuse to help bring them home. According to the DOJ, the Constitution does not protect anybody, citizen or not, from rendition to a foreign black site. To the contrary, the Constitution prohibits federal courts from demanding the return of a person deported to an overseas prison. In the Justice Department’s view, the executive branch has absolute, unreviewable authority to leave them there forever, even if they were expelled unlawfully, and remain subject to ongoing, unlawful banishment, torture, and potentially death. Put simply, this administration is creating a blueprint for the permanent disappearance of anyone, for any reason, with no legal recourse whatsoever.

It is telling that the Justice Department has suspended the attorneys originally assigned to Abrego Garcia’s case, reportedly for admitting that the government made a mistake in deporting him. In Roth and Ensign, it found two Trump-aligned mercenaries willing to sacrifice their credibility for the sake of the president’s autocratic ambitions. These attorneys deserve to be held in contempt of court for their disgraceful deception and subject to severe sanctions for besmirching the legal profession. While sanctions may help combat the rot within the DOJ, though, they will not solve the deeper problem here. Trump and his allies are obviously directing this reprehensible campaign, and if anything can stop them, it will be an emphatic rebuke from the Supreme Court. Until a majority of the justices find enough courage to unambiguously reject this plot, the administration will continue to steamroll lower courts that stand in its way.

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