Prof. Alan Rozenshtein Quoted in New York Times Analysis of Maryland Man Unlawfully Deported

Professor Alan Rozenshtein was quoted in a New York Times analysis of the Trump administration’s current actions regarding the Maryland man unlawfully deported and being detained in an El Salvador prison. Lawyers for the federal government on Tuesday told a judge that the government is following her order to facilitate the return of a mistakenly deported Maryland man. A government lawyer said if the man were to show up at a port of entry, the government would not turn him away. But Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, has no way to get to the border on his own and the president has said he has no intention of returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. The judge rebuked the government for doing nothing to facilitate his return. A similar pattern has occurred in other cases in which the client (the president) wants his lawyers to make arguments with little legal or factual basis. A question of what action courts should then take occurs, including holding lawyers or their superiors in contempt. But according to Prof. Rozenshtein, penalizing the Justice Department is fraught, given the Trump administration’s combative stance toward the judiciary. He said, “If courts frequently call out government falsehoods or bad faith, and the executive branch ignores or dismisses these findings, the judiciary’s authority is diminished.” But if courts don’t call out the falsehoods, he said, they may lose “credibility with the public.”