A federal judge in Maryland, temporarily defusing a showdown with the White House, ordered the Trump administration on Friday to provide daily updates about its progress toward returning a man who was unlawfully deported to El Salvador last month.
The instructions by the judge, Paula Xinis, came at the end of a contentious day on which the Justice Department first defied her order to provide a written explanation of its plans to free the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, and then repeatedly stonewalled her efforts to get even the most basic information about him at a hearing.
By demanding that the government detail its progress and promising to track “everything the government is doing and not doing,” Judge Xinis avoided an immediate conflict with the White House. But the clashes — both inside the courtroom and over the department’s refusal to comply with her demand for a road map to release Mr. Abrego Garcia — left open the possibility of a standoff in the future.
The administration has had friction with judges in other cases — particularly those involving President Trump’s deportation policies — but the conflict with Judge Xinis was one of the most combative yet. Last week, a federal judge in Washington said there was a “fair likelihood” that the administration had violated one of his rulings ordering the White House to stop using a powerful wartime statute to deport scores of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador.
The dispute involving Judge Xinis emerged directly from a Supreme Court ruling issued on Thursday evening in which the justices told Trump officials to take steps to free Mr. Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran migrant, from a notorious prison in El Salvador where he was sent with scores of other migrants on March 15.
The officials have already acknowledged that they made an “administrative error” when they put Mr. Abrego Garcia on the plane, despite a previous court order that had expressly prohibited sending him back to his homeland.