Trump Team Wrecked by Judge for “Bad Faith” Efforts on Abrego Garcia

A federal judge slammed the Department of Justice for refusing to provide answers about the government’s efforts to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.

In an eight-page filing Tuesday evening, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis overruled several of the government’s objections to answering questions or providing documents, writing that their failure “reflects a willful and bad faith refusal to comply with discovery obligations.”

Lawyers for the DOJ failed to respond to a court-ordered request for information Monday, arguing that it had been made on a “false premise” that the government was required to secure Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador. The Supreme Court had ordered the government to “facilitate” his return. Crucially, Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, and the government has failed to provide any compelling evidence of his alleged gang affiliation.

In her filing, Xinis said that the government had “stubbornly” refused to provide “any basis” for the privileges it was attempting to invoke in its evasion of her questions.

For weeks, lawyers for the government had attempted to hide behind “vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege” to “obstruct discovery and evade compliance,” Xinis wrote. “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this Court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”

Xinis told the lawyers that they would have only 24 hours to assert any final privileges in the requisite detail.

“If Defendants want to preserve their privilege claims, they must support them with the required detail. Otherwise, they will lose the protections they failed to properly invoke,” she warned.

Xinis excoriated the government’s refusal to provide additional names of those involved in Abrego Garcia’s deportation as “willful and intentional noncompliance,” and overruled the lawyers’ claim that information about how he was placed in CECOT, the prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses, was “outside the scope” of expedited discovery.

“This is particularly relevant to Abrego Garcia’s custodial status today, if for nothing else, the Plaintiffs are entitled to discover all relevant and probative evidence that undermines the Defendants’ incomplete and evasive answer that Abrego Garcia is in the ‘sovereign, domestic custody’ of El Salvador,” she wrote.

In a meeting with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen last week, Abrego Garcia said he had since been moved to a different prison.

Donald Trump is backtracking on some of his wild economic moves.

The president said Tuesday that has “no intention” of firing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, after days of insults and threats over whether Powell would cut interest rates. It’s quite a reversal from Trump saying Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough,” the week before. Still, Trump would like those rate cuts.

“I would like to see [Powell] be a little more active in terms of his idea to lower interest rates,” Trump said Tuesday while swearing in the new Securities and Exchange Commission chair. “It is a perfect time to lower interest rates.”

Trump also backed down from threatening China on Tuesday, saying that he wouldn’t seek to punish China any further in the Oval Office and telling reporters that tariff rates against the country would be lowered.

“[The rates] will come down substantially, but it won’t be zero,” Trump said, adding that “we’re going to be very nice, and they’re going to be very nice, and we’ll see what happens.” China appears to be reciprocating, with a spokesperson for the country’s Foreign Ministry telling reporters Wednesday that “the door for talks is wide open.”

It seems that the struggling stock market and panicked U.S. executives have persuaded Trump to modify whatever concepts of a plan he has for the economy, as every economic indicator spells disaster. Trump’s tariff whiplash, where he has alternated between raising and lowering tariffs, has caused market chaos for several weeks.

Instituting an astronomical tariff rate of 145 percent against China, one of the country’s largest trading partners, has not inspired confidence from American businesses, and China is holding firm on getting Trump to back down. Tuesday’s shift from the president indicates that he is fearful of what will happen if his current approach backfires.

Vice President JD Vance admitted outright on Wednesday that the United States is prepared to completely abandon Ukraine. 

“We’ve issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and Ukrainians, and it’s time for them to either say yes, or for the U.S. to walk away from this process,” he said from India. “We’ve engaged in an extraordinary amount of diplomacy, of on-the-ground work.

“The current lines, somewhere close to them is where you’re ultimately, I think, going to draw the new lines in the conflict,” Vance added, making it clear that Ukraine would have to give up territory to Russia.

This comes as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump envoy Steve Witkoff decided not to attend the planned meeting between the U.S., Ukraine, and other European leaders, due to what Rubio’s spokesperson called “logistical issues.” 

The U.S. has been unilaterally trying to strong-arm Ukraine into a ceasefire with Russia, while the Europeans try to support Ukraine’s attempts to fight off the Russian invasion. These talks were supposed to be an attempt to bridge the gap between the U.S. and Europe and to make Putin negotiate on more equitable terms that don’t see him retaining large chunks of Ukrainian territory. But Vance just gave the Kremlin yet another green light. 

Elon Musk’s far-right turn as the head of the Department of Efficiency has apparently tanked Tesla’s earnings.

In a humiliating first-quarter report published Tuesday, Tesla reported that profits had crashed by a whopping 71 percent, falling to a mere $409 million, compared with $1.39 billion from the same quarter last year.

The company vastly underperformed compared to Wall Street’s expectations for per-share profit, reporting an adjusted earnings per share of 27 cents, well below the expectations of 41 cents.

Sales slipped dramatically as well, dropping 13 percent from the same period last year. The electric vehicles have become controversial symbols of Donald Trump’s administration and Musk’s cost-cutting antics at DOGE, making them targets of widespread vandalism.

Musk was reportedly considering stepping back as DOGE czar when his special government employee status ends next month, which should come as no surprise. The Washington Post reported that the billionaire bureaucrat was tired of “attacks” from the left.

Dan Ives, a Wedbush Security financial analyst, wrote to clients on Sunday that Musk pulling back from DOGE is the only way that Tesla can recover, according to Bloomberg.

“Musk needs to leave the government, take a major step back on DOGE, and get back to being CEO of Tesla full-time,” Ives wrote. “Tesla is Musk and Musk is Tesla … and anyone that thinks the brand damage Musk has inflicted is not a real thing, spend some time speaking to car buyers in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. You will think differently after those discussions.”

This latest earnings report may have been the wake-up call Musk needed. On a call with investors Tuesday, Musk reportedly said that he was planning to cut down on his time spent working with DOGE to two days a week starting in May.

Several employees in the Environmental Protection Agency spent their Earth Day learning that they needed to find new jobs.

Hundreds of staffers in the department’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights were laid off as part of a reduction in force Tuesday, as were employees working on environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in regional offices.

In February, environmental justice staffers were placed on administrative leave and some of the agency’s probationary workers were fired. Now, 280 workers involved with environmental justice and diversity, equity and inclusion will be terminated, with 175 other EPA workers being assigned to new jobs. It’s all part of EPA chief Lee Zeldin’s pledge to drive “a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” According to an EPA memo obtained by NBC News, the reduction in force will take effect on July 31.

The EPA under Trump is ditching its mission of actually protecting the environment. The department rolled back environmental regulations last month along with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition to the rollbacks and cuts, the agency also tried to cut grants to nonprofit organizations in an attack on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, set up by President Biden with the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. A federal judge temporarily nixed those plans last month.

The regulatory changes that Zeldin is pushing with Trump’s blessing will harm countless Americans, including Trump’s supporters. “It’s practically inevitable” that more people will get sick from reduced regulation and the loss of funding, one EPA staffer anonymously told TNR earlier this month.

It’s fitting that Tuesday’s layoff announcement fell on Earth Day because the Trump administration has shown that it cares little, if anything, about the earth. The new energy secretary, fracking executive Chris Wright, last month described climate change as the “side effect of building the modern world.”

The FBI has moved to criminalize groups like Habitat for Humanity for receiving grants from the EPA under the Biden administration, and Trump himself has claimed that climate change will provide more seafront property and is therefore better for real estate. The White House is celebrating Earth Day by making the planet worse.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, has begun baselessly claiming that birthright citizenship has become a massive welfare scam.

During an appearance on Newsmax Monday evening, Miller ranted about Donald Trump’s executive order to upend birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court will weigh next month.

“Birthright citizenship is the biggest, costliest scam in financial history,” Miller ranted. “An illegal alien could come here nine months pregnant, or on a tourist visa nine months pregnant, have a baby. That baby is then declared an automatic citizen, which then entitles the entire family to come here and live here, and every one of them get welfare … unlimited welfare, applying as the custodian of this citizen—so-called—child.”

“The biggest financial rip-off of Americans in history, not to mention the fact that it is the number one magnet for illegal immigration and invasion,” Miller continued.

With his penchant for white nationalism, Miller is no stranger to making disgusting, racist generalizations about immigrants. Miller has previously endorsed a theory called “remigration” that, unlike deportation, refers to the forcible removal of non–ethnically European immigrants and their families, regardless of their actual citizenship.

In a particularly outrageous escalation, Miller also claimed, without providing evidence, that birthright citizenship was a “major national security threat” that had been “used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States.”

Halfway through his outrageous claim Monday, he switched to a hypothetical. “Because now, you see we can keep out a foreign spy who has a visa, who’s trying to get permission to board an airplane—but what happens when a foreign government uses this ridiculous birthright scam in order to create automatic citizens to then grow up as assets of a foreign government?” he demanded.

Birthright citizenship was established in the Fourteenth Amendment: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Congress and the states ratified the amendment in 1869 to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dred Scott v. Sanford, which had held that people of African descent can never acquire American citizenship, and to provide a constitutional backstop for Black civil rights in the South during Reconstruction. Miller argued that the use of the birthright citizenship clause had strayed too far from its intended purpose.

The ghoulish white supremacist has also become one of the Trump administration’s strongest advocates for denying due process for undocumented immigrants it seeks to remove.

The Trump administration is not only refusing to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but it spelled “United States” wrong while explaining why.

In a response issued Monday evening, the Department of Justice failed to answer questions from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers submitted in a court-approved interrogatory. “Defendants object to Interrogatory No. 1 as based on the false premise that the United States can, or has been ordered to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody,” the DOJ’s response reads.

It then quotes the Supreme Court as having said, “Defendant should ‘take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United State.’” Misquoting the Supreme Court and a typo? It’s a great start from the Justice Department as it tries to defend deporting an innocent man it claims is part of a gang because of his knuckle tattoos.

After the Trump administration unlawfully deported 29-year-old Abrego Garcia to El Salvador due to an admitted “administrative error,” the Supreme Court ordered the government to “facilitate” his return, as did U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. But the administration has since taken no steps to do so, and it maintains without evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Because of Trump’s inaction, Xinis allowed Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to submit an interrogatory in search of answers, of which they got none. Along with spelling the country’s name incorrectly, the DOJ refused to answer any questions from the father-of-three’s attorneys in its response. It instead maintained that any rulings ordering the facilitation of Abrego Garcia’s return are a “false premise”—a pathetic excuse for inaction given that’s exactly what they were ordered to do.

The corruption charges against New York Mayor Eric Adams may have been dropped and the case dismissed, but the fallout still continues. 

Three federal prosecutors announced their resignations Tuesday, saying that they would quit their jobs rather than admit wrongdoing in continuing to pursue the case against Adams, The New York Times reports. 

In an email, prosecutors Celia V. Cohen, Andrew Rohrbach, and Derek Wikstrom, who all worked on the Adams case, said that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche made their admitting to wrongdoing a condition of their reinstatement from administrative leave, after corruption charges against Adams were dropped in February.  

“We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none,” the trio wrote in the email, adding, “Now, the Department has decided that obedience supersedes all else, requiring us to abdicate our legal and ethical obligations in favor of directions from Washington.”

Adams spent much of 2024 openly lobbying President Trump to intervene in the federal charges against him for bribery, fraud, and soliciting political donations from Turkish officials in exchange for favors. His efforts paid off two months ago, although comments from Trump’s border czar Tom Homan made it seem like the DOJ was dropping charges in exchange for Adams cracking down on immigrants in New York City. 

Seven prosecutors resigned last month rather than carry out the order from Washington to drop the charges. Now, even though the case was dismissed with prejudice, preventing the Trump administration from using it as leverage over Adams in the future, it appears that the administration tried to get a show of fealty from Manhattan federal prosecutors. While three of them refused, Trump’s DOJ has won the chance to install loyalist attorneys to protect the president and his friends.

A federal judge has ordered that the Trump administration has until 5 p.m. Tuesday to reinstate the legal status of 133 students who had their visas revoked. Many international students have been targeted by the Trump administration for their activism around Israel’s war on Gaza, while others have had their visas revoked over minor incidents.

Judge Victoria Calvert issued a temporary restraining order on behalf of the students, who argued that Immigration and Customs Enforcement “abruptly and unlawfully” terminated their records on the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, making them vulnerable to deportation. The judge’s order of reinstatement applies retroactively to March 21, 2025.

“The Constitution protects everyone on American soil, so the Trump administration cannot ignore due process to unjustifiably threaten students with the loss of immigration status, and arrest and deportation,” said ACLU senior staff attorney Avika Friedlin. “We believe this ruling shows the students are likely to prevail on their claims, and we are pleased the court ordered the government to halt its unlawful actions while the lawsuit continues.”

The Trump administration has already terminated the visas of more than 1,550 international students, putting them at heightened risk of deportation. The Georgia case will be heard for a preliminary injunction on Thursday.