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    Defense Lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia Ask Judge to Release Him Pretrial

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    The request came as lawyers in Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s separate civil case were poised to ask a different judge to hold the Trump administration in contempt for sidestepping one of her orders.Defense lawyers for Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was recently brought back to the United States to face a federal indictment after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador, said in court papers on Wednesday that he should remain free from custody as he awaits trial.The papers, filed in Federal District Court in Nashville, amounted to the opening salvo of efforts by the defense lawyers to challenge the charges that were filed last week against Mr. Abrego Garcia.“With no legal process whatsoever, the United States government illegally detained and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia and shipped him to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) in El Salvador, one of the most violent, inhumane prisons in the world,” the lawyers wrote.“The government now asks this court to detain him further,” they went on, asking Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., who is handling the criminal case, to deny the request. Judge Crenshaw is set to hold a hearing on Friday to arraign Mr. Abrego Garcia and to hear arguments about whether to detain him before the trial.Mr. Abrego Garcia, a metalworker who was living in Maryland when he was arrested on March 12 and summarily deported three days later to El Salvador, had for weeks been trying through lawyers representing him in a separate civil case to enforce a court order instructing the Trump administration to take active measures toward securing his freedom.But after the administration repeatedly sought to sidestep and delay complying with that order, the Justice Department abruptly changed course. Top department officials announced on Friday that Mr. Abrego Garcia had been brought back to the United States to stand trial on charges of taking part in a yearslong conspiracy to smuggle thousands of undocumented immigrants across the country as a member of the violent street gang MS-13.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Return of Abrego Garcia Raises Questions About Trump’s Views of Justice

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      For the nearly three months before the Justice Department secured an indictment against the man, it had repeatedly flouted a series of court orders to “facilitate” his release from El Salvador.When Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on Friday that Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia had been returned to the United States to face criminal charges after being wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador, she sought to portray the move as the White House dutifully upholding the rule of law.“This,” she said, “is what American justice looks like.”Her assertion, however, failed to grapple with the fact that for the nearly three months before the Justice Department secured an indictment against Mr. Abrego Garcia, it had repeatedly flouted a series of court orders — including one from the Supreme Court — to “facilitate” his release.While the indictment filed against Mr. Abrego Garcia contained serious allegations, accusing him of taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants as a member of the street gang MS-13, it had no bearing on the issues that have sat at the heart of the case since his summary expulsion in March.Those were whether Mr. Abrego Garcia had received due process when he was plucked off the streets without a warrant and expelled days later to a prison in El Salvador, in what even Trump officials have repeatedly admitted was an error. And, moreover, whether administration officials should be held in contempt for repeatedly stonewalling a judge’s effort to get to the bottom of their actions.Well before Mr. Abrego Garcia’s family filed a lawsuit seeking to force the White House to release him from El Salvador, administration officials had tried all means at their disposal to keep him overseas as they figured out a solution to the problem they had created, The New York Times found in a recent investigation.Cesar Ábrego García, left, and Cecilia García, center, the brother and mother of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, participated in a press conference with Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, following his trip to El Salvador.Allison Bailey for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Orders Investigation of Biden and His Aides

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      The executive order is the latest effort by President Trump to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor and question the legality of his actions in office.President Trump ordered his White House counsel and the attorney general on Wednesday to investigate former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his staff in Mr. Trump’s latest attempt to stoke outlandish conspiracy theories about his predecessor.In an executive order, Mr. Trump put the power and resources of the federal government to work examining whether some of Mr. Biden’s presidential actions were legally invalid because his aides had enacted those policies without his knowledge.The executive order came after Mr. Trump shared a social media post over the weekend that claimed Mr. Biden had been “executed in 2020” and replaced by a robotic clone, following a pattern of suggestions by the president and his allies that Mr. Biden was a mentally incapacitated puppet of his aides.The former president called such claims “ridiculous and false” in a statement on Wednesday after the order’s release.“Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency,” he said. “I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation and proclamations.”The order comes after disclosure in recent weeks that Mr. Biden, 82, had received a diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer and in the wake of renewed scrutiny of his health during his presidency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Judge Considers Early Release of Martin Luther King Jr. Assassination Documents

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      The materials are scheduled to be unsealed in 2027, but President Trump signed an executive order in January aimed at moving up the date.A federal judge in Washington said on Wednesday that he was open to lifting a court order ahead of schedule to release potentially sensitive documents related to the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., nodding to an executive order President Trump signed in January aimed at achieving that outcome.During a hearing on Wednesday to discuss the possibility, Judge Richard Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia nonetheless cautioned that he intended to proceed slowly and prioritize privacy in an extended process to determine whether any documents should be released before 2027, the date that another judge set in 1977 for the documents to be unsealed.Judge Leon said he would start by ordering the National Archives to show him — and him alone — an inventory of all the sealed materials related to Dr. King that have been stored there.He said that the inventory, which the government says it has not reviewed, might help shed light on whether documents specifically related to Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, and the investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that followed, had been separated out and could be efficiently processed.The hearing on Wednesday came through a lawsuit brought by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization based in Atlanta associated with Dr. King, which has sued to halt any effort to unseal documents early.It came in response to an executive order Mr. Trump signed in January that directed intelligence agencies to set in motion plans to release records related to the assassinations of Dr. King, President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Drops Biden-Era Push to Obtain Peter Navarro’s Emails

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      The department’s move is one of many recent actions taken to dismiss criminal and civil actions against Trump allies such as Mr. Navarro, the president’s trade adviser.The Justice Department has abruptly dropped its effort to force Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, to turn over hundreds of his emails dating to the first Trump administration to the National Archives, according to a court filing on Tuesday.The decision to drop the civil lawsuit was disclosed in a one-page notice filed in Federal District Court in the District of Columbia. The department offered no explanation for the move, but it is one of many recent actions it has taken to dismiss criminal and civil actions taken against Trump allies.Mr. Navarro, 75, had long resisted the government’s request that he give the archives emails from his personal ProtonMail account relating to his role as a White House adviser, as required by the Presidential Records Act.Defiance is Mr. Navarro’s default. He served about four months in the geriatric unit of a federal prison in Miami after refusing to comply with a subpoena to appear before a congressional committee investigating his false claims about the 2020 election.In 2022, the Biden Justice Department sued Mr. Navarro, one of the main architects of Mr. Trump’s second-term tariff policy, to retrieve the communications. The lawsuit charged him with “wrongfully retaining presidential records that are the property of the United States, and which constitute part of the permanent historical record of the prior administration.”The lawsuit accused Mr. Navarro of using his private email account to conduct public work, including an effort to influence the White House response to the pandemic. Those emails were needed to preserve the historical record, officials at the archives said.Mr. Navarro unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court to dismiss the suit last year.A federal magistrate judge earlier reviewed about 900 messages, determining that more than 500 were not presidential records. He ordered additional hearings to decide how many of the remaining 350-plus emails needed to be turned over to the government.Mr. Navarro’s lawyer did not immediately return a request for comment.Stanley Woodward, who represented Mr. Navarro in both his civil and criminal cases, recused himself after Mr. Trump appointed him in April to serve as associate attorney general. More

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      A Trump Official Threatens to Sue California Schools Over Trans Athletes

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      A letter from the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Harmeet K. Dhillon, said that allowing trans athletes to compete in high school sports was unconstitutional.The U.S. Department of Justice on Monday threatened legal action against California public schools if they continued to allow trans athletes to compete in high school sports, calling the students’ participation unconstitutional and giving the schools a week to comply.In a letter sent to public school districts in the state, Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said the California Interscholastic Federation’s 2013 bylaw that allowed trans athletes to compete violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and discriminated against athletes on the basis of sex.“Scientific evidence shows that upsetting the historical status quo and forcing girls to compete against males would deprive them of athletic opportunities and benefits because of their sex,” Ms. Dhillon wrote, referring to trans girls as males.Elizabeth Sanders, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Education, said on Monday that the department was preparing to send guidance to the state’s school districts on how to respond, and that it would do so on Tuesday.The Justice Department’s move came two days after a trans girl won championships in two girls’ events at the California state track and field meet, and less than a week after President Trump decried her inclusion in the competition, saying that he would cut federal funding to the state if it let her participate.At the meet, held over two days in Clovis, Calif., the trans girl, AB Hernandez, won the girls’ high jump and triple jump, and also finished second in the long jump for Jurupa Valley High School, in what is arguably the most competitive high school meet in the nation. In a statement provided by the group TransFamily Support Services, her mother, Nereyda Hernandez, said that it was her daughter’s third year of competing in sports.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Stephen Miller Staffer and Tough Talk: Inside Trump’s Latest Attack on Harvard

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      The Justice Department opened an investigation into the student-run Harvard Law Review. The startling accusations show how the Trump administration is wielding power in pursuit of its political agenda.The Justice Department quietly approached Harvard University last month with startling claims, even by the extraordinary standards of the Trump administration’s monthslong assault on the elite college.The department signaled that it was reviewing claims of discrimination against white men at The Harvard Law Review, and accused the renowned publication of destroying evidence in an open investigation. The administration demanded that Harvard “cease and desist” from interfering.In a series of letters that have not been previously reported, the government also disclosed that it had a “cooperating witness” inside the student-run journal. That witness now works in the White House under Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s domestic policy agenda, Trump officials confirmed.The Law Review is independent of Harvard University. The allegations nonetheless deepened fears among Harvard officials that the administration appeared eager to escalate one of its civil investigations into a criminal inquiry, underscoring how the university’s problems with President Trump extend far beyond the loss of billions in federal funding.But the aggressive language in the letters from the Justice Department’s two top civil rights lawyers appeared to have overstated the allegations in pursuit of an additional way to punish Harvard. In that way, the episode fits a broader trend in how the administration is wielding federal investigatory powers to impose its political agenda.From reshaping the economy to ramping up deportations to punishing the nation’s elite law firms and universities, Mr. Trump’s government has repeatedly prized speed and shock value over the kind of methodical steps typically taken to build a legal case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump, Bashing the Federalist Society, Asserts Autonomy on Judge Picks

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      The president has grown increasingly angry at court rulings blocking parts of his agenda, including by judges he appointed.President Trump appears to be declaring independence from outside constraints on how he nominates judges, signaling that he is looking for loyalists who will uphold his agenda and denouncing the conservative legal network that helped him remake the federal judiciary in his first term.Late Thursday, after a ruling struck down his tariffs on most imported goods, Mr. Trump attacked the Federalist Society, leaders of which heavily influenced his selection of judges during his first presidency.“I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations,” Mr. Trump asserted on social media. “This is something that cannot be forgotten!”Hours earlier Thursday, the Justice Department severely undercut the traditional role of the American Bar Association in vetting judicial nominees. A day before, Mr. Trump picked a loyalist who has no deep ties to the conservative legal movement for a life-tenured appeals court seat, explaining that his pick could be counted on to rule in ways aligned with his agenda.Together, the moves suggest that Mr. Trump may be pivoting toward greater personal involvement and a more idiosyncratic process for selecting future nominees. Such a shift would fit with his second-term pattern of steamrolling the guardrails that sometimes constrained how he exercised power during his first presidency.But it could also give pause to judges who may be weighing taking senior status, giving Mr. Trump an opportunity to fill their seats. Conservatives have been eyeing in particular the seats of the Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas, who will turn 77 next month, and Samuel A. Alito, 75.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More