Judge Orders DOJ to Get Answers On Wrongful Removals

BALTIMORE — A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to be prepared to provide answers to the court Monday after surprise testimony this week that more than 100 asylum seekers were deported in violation of a court-approved settlement agreement.

On Friday — the second day of what was supposed to be a one-day hearing but will now extend to three days — U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher demanded that the Justice Department “get to the bottom” of what happened. She also raised concerns for the first time that government lawyers might not uphold their duty of candor to the court.

Gallagher returned on her own without prompting from either party for yesterday’s explosive testimony, first reported by TPM, from a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer that somewhere in the “low 100” asylum seekers protected from deportation by the settlement agreement were deported anyway.

Saying she was “extremely concerned” and that the number of unlawful removals reaching triple digits, compared to less than a dozen previously known cases, was new to the court, Gallagher focused particularly on the witness’s testimony that this information had been relayed to USCIS attorneys three to four weeks ago but that nothing had been raised with the court since then.

“I am concerned about the attorney’s duty of candor to the court,” she told career Justice Department lawyers in the courtroom.

In response, Justice Department lawyers revealed for the first time publicly that they did not know the substance of the explosive testimony before it was delivered in court.

“This was news to the DOJ attorneys as well,” DOJ attorney Ruth Ann Mueller told Gallagher, while noting that during the course of the litigation, the government’s legal team informed opposing class-action attorneys of other wrongful dismissals as soon as they became aware of them.

The government’s position in this case has been that to the extent that there were evictions in violation of the settlement agreement (and a subsequent court decision), they were few in number. Before yesterday’s testimony, it was believed there were between nine and twelve wrongful evictions. For comparison, the number of class members protected by the settlement agreement ranges from 70,000 to 75,000, according to testimony in this case.

Gallagher raised the possibility that the government’s various lawyers might not all be on the same page. “There may be a disconnect between DOJ attorneys and agency attorneys, which is deeply concerning,” Gallagher said.

“We have been working with the agency’s lawyers to get to the bottom of this,” Mueller said in response, promising to report back Monday with answers.

The judge left open the possibility that the revelation did not have as much substance as the witness’s testimony suggested. “It’s possible the agency’s lawyers looked at it and decided there wasn’t one,” Gallagher said. “But we don’t know. We haven’t heard.”

This week’s developments come in a case that first gained national attention a year ago, when one of the members of the group named in court filings only as “Cristian” was deported under the Alien Enemies Act to CECOT in El Salvador. After Gallagher ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, it slowed its response.

“Cristian” was eventually sent to Venezuela with the rest of the AEA detainees, and the group’s lawyers lost contact with him. In a November ruling, Gallagher wrote:

It is possible, at this stage, that Cristian has decided to forgo a return to the United States and has voluntarily absented himself from any contact with his lawyer. It is also possible that Cristian was a victim of the anticipated violence that led him to seek asylum in the United States in the first place.

His whereabouts are unknown.

The settlement agreement in question was reached in 2024 under the Biden administration. Basically, it protects a subset of unaccompanied minors from deportation until their asylum case is heard.

Much of the past two days of testimony has focused on rather tedious bureaucratic considerations, such as whether ICE’s case management system correctly flags group members, whether deportation officers have seen and complied with those alerts, and how USCIS updates ICE with the identities of group members who should not be deported.

Gallagher was very angered yesterday by the government’s failure to comply with her order to produce witnesses who could testify based on their own personal knowledge of how the wrongful evictions took place. The government provided a somewhat improved set of witnesses Friday, including an ICE unit chief whose testimony was completed yesterday but was brought back today and sworn in a second time to provide more complete information, which he had written on the back of his business card because the place where he spent the night was undocumented.

But there were still gaps in the government’s case, and Gallagher ordered it to call additional witnesses when the hearing resumed Monday. But the main spectacle on Monday will be the question of expulsions in the “low hundreds”. TPM, which was the only media to cover the hearing, will return to court on Monday.