The Administration Is Playing Dumb

Plus: Cuomo gains traction, inside Elon Musk’s paternity deals, Rumsfeld sass, and more…

The Supreme Court issued an unsigned decision this past Thursday instructing the Trump administration to facilitate the Salvadoran man’s return to the United States. “The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” said the ruling.

This has not happened. Now, Xinis is investigating why—and receiving rather dissatisfying responses from the administration and its lawyers.

“There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding,” said Xinis at yesterday’s hearing, the start of a two-week inquiry into what the Trump administration is doing to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

Over the course of this inquiry, “four senior officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State will have to sit for depositions by April 23,” reports Politico, describing these as “essentially out-of-court interviews in which the officials will have to answer questions under oath from Abrego Garcia’s lawyers.”

Xinis summed up her thoughts on the government’s very passive stance toward complying with the Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return: “Defendants therefore remain obligated, at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” Ensign playing dumb won’t cut it, in other words.

“The government has not even unambiguously requested his return,” one of Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said yesterday in court, adding that it’s not uncommon for the U.S. to do so in immigration cases. “The government routinely seeks return by taking low-level actions outside the United States that do not implicate foreign policy.”

“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” said Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Monday from the Oval Office, where he was meeting with President Donald Trump. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” Vice President J.D. Vance took to X to call Abrego Garcia a “gang member.” Then multiple Fox News commentators sounded off on the case, with once-libertarian Greg Gutfeld saying “At worst, a guy gets sent to a country he doesn’t want to go to—you know what? I can live with that.”

That’s a wild way to describe Abrego Garcia being wrongly deported to CECOT, El Salvador’s worst and most brutal prison, despite a judge granting him withholding of removal in 2019, having found his fear of persecution in El Salvador credible and protecting him from exactly this fate. Now, he’s being tarred by Bukele, Vance, Trump, and their media helpers, called an MS-13 member when the only evidence we have to establish that comes from a police informant saying so and the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hoodie. Where’s the justice in that?

Now, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D–Md.)—who counts Abrego Garcia and his family as his constituents—is traveling to El Salvador to attempt to speak with him and report back to his family about his condition. “We were in the gray zone before this. But if the Trump administration continues to thumb its nose at the federal courts in this case we’re in, we’re clearly in constitutional crisis territory,” said Van Hollen.

QUICK HITS

• Is it possible that an anti-war faction within Defense Department was responsible for the leak?

• This is bad, as Reuters and the Associated Press tend to be relatively reliable, with less spin than places like The Washington Post:

• “[Financial authorities] should have three priorities [to maintain market stability]: Identify the weakest links, keep markets functioning as smoothly as possible, and provide solvent firms with ample access to cash, so they won’t dump assets or fail unnecessarily,” argue Bloomberg writers.
• “The United Kingdom’s highest court ruled on Wednesday that the definition of a woman under equality legislation referred to ‘biological sex,'” reports Reuters. Sanity, at long last.
• Long, sad piece about Elon Musk’s desire to use his sperm and the eggs of various women he finds to create a “‘legion’ [of children], a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire.”
• Lots of discourse online about this article by Stephanie Murray, writing for Slate. I, of course, have done this (thread here):

• And, lest you still have hunger for more parenting and babymaking discourse, here’s an Elizabeth Bruenig piece in The Atlantic on the many weirdos at Natal Conference. To my mind, the factions she identifies within pronatalism—the tech and the trad—are broadly correct. But we’re sorely in need of a normie wing: people who are just…extremely reasonable about it all, interested in changing parenting culture so that it’s less onerous and judgmental, and focused on emphasizing more of the benefits of having larger families.
• Yesterday was theft day. Here’s the iconic Donald Rumsfeld letter to the Internal Revenue Service:

Associate Editor, Reason

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