By Hannah Gaskill
The Baltimore Sun
(TNS)
(The Baltimore Sun) — Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said attorneys under President Donald Trump are “playing dumb” regarding the U.S. Supreme Court ruling to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
“The pressure needs to continue to be on the administration to, in fact, facilitate — as is the meaning of ‘facilitate’ in the Webster’s Dictionary — to get Mr. Abrego Garcia home,” Brown, who would not go into detail about the specifics of the case, said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun.
Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father of two who was given legal standing to live and work in the United States, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on March 12. Days later, he was confirmed held at CECOT, or the Terrorism Confinement Center, a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
The Trump administration has since said he was deported because of an “administrative error.”
Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered officials to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. He is still being held in detention in El Salvador, though he was moved to a different prison than CECOT.
In a Tuesday interview with ABC News correspondent Terry Moran, Trump said he has the ability to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., but won’t.
“The person that you’re talkin’ about, you know, you’re makin’ this person sound — this is a MS-13 gang member, a tough cookie, been in lots of skirmishes, beat the hell out of his wife, and the wife was petrified to even talk about him, okay? This is not an innocent, wonderful gentleman from Maryland…,” Trump told Moran during an interview in the Oval Office.
Speaking last week with The Baltimore Sun regarding the impact of Trump’s first 100 days in office, Brown was hesitant to define the current political moment as a constitutional crisis — in spite of the 15 lawsuits the state has directly entered in response to the administration over the past 101 days.
Brown’s major constitutional concern — “from a legal standpoint,” he said — is what happens if and when Trump refuses to comply with final judgments issued by federal judges or the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Then I think we are in a true constitutional crisis, because the Constitution sets up three branches of government and a system of checks and balances that has been honored for over 200 years,” said Brown.
But the Trump administration is already flouting federal court orders in the case of Abrego Garcia.
In late April, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis admonished Trump’s attorneys in the case for ignoring her orders, obstructing the legal process and acting in “bad faith” by refusing to provide information.
Xinis ordered the Trump administration to return Abrego Garcia to the United States on April 4. The U.S. Department of Justice appealed the order less than a week later. On April 10, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered administration officials to facilitate his return.
A day later, lawyers for Trump said they did not have information regarding Abrego Garcia’s location, condition or steps to bring him back, prompting U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland’s senior senator, to travel to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia and attempt to negotiate his custody.
Van Hollen, who faced criticism from the Trump administration and loyal Republicans for his trip, sent a letter to the president Tuesday detailing his conversation with El Salvadorian Vice President Félix Ulloa.
According to Van Hollen, Ulloa said the decision to release Abrego Garcia is in the hands of the U.S. government — not the government of El Salvador, as Trump officials indicated.
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