U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis is the latest judge at odds with the Trump administration.
In a scathing rebuke, she characterized the government as acting in “bad faith” by refusing to provide information about what it has done to try to free Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a prison in El Salvador, where he was wrongly deported, and return him to the United States.
On the federal bench for nearly a decade, Xinis has experienced partisan pushback since her nomination by Democratic President Barack Obama. She also was accused of being too tough on law enforcement during earlier legal work for a police oversight office.
A look at who Xinis is and some of the other cases she’s been involved in:
Earlier this month, Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. That decision was affirmed by the Supreme Court, although the justices said her order needed to be clarified to make sure it did not intrude upon executive branch power over foreign affairs.
“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,” the court said.
The administration conceded it made a mistake in sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. But it argued that it no longer could do anything about trying to bring him back. Officials have claimed Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang, though he has never been charged with or convicted of a crime. His lawyers have said there is no evidence that he is a member of MS-13 or any gang.
Last week, Xinis said that she would order sworn testimony by administration officials to determine whether they complied with her orders to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. She said officials had defied a “clear” Supreme Court order and that White House officials and El Salvador’s president, in saying they were unable to bring him back, were like “two very misguided ships passing in the night.”
In 2020, Xinis issued a preliminary injunction halting portions of immigration rules enacted under the first Trump administration that would have limited people seeking asylum in the U.S. from being able to obtain authorization to work.
Another court subsequently vacated the rules entirely, and the lawsuit was dismissed.
Obama nominated Xinis in March 2015 to the federal bench in Maryland, where the courts had declared a “judicial emergency” due to the number of pending cases. The seat had been vacant since October 2014, with the Senate slowing its approval of judges nominated by a president of the opposing party in the later months of a president’s final year in office.
Xinis won support from Republican leaders, including the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, and then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But some conservatives felt Xinis was too tough on law enforcement in her legal career. They cited her record as an examiner for the Office of Police Complaints in Washington, a civilian oversight entity.
Her confirmation vote in May 2016 came shortly after then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., had noted that her law firm had represented the family of Freddie Gray, who died a year earlier after his neck was broken while he was handcuffed and shackled in the back of a Baltimore police van. Gray’s death prompted riots in that city, and his case has been frequently mentioned in the national conversation about police brutality.
“She has built a career in dealing with lawsuits against police and police departments and dealing with complaints against the police,” Sessions said, adding that the frequency with which she ruled against the police made him uneasy.
Xinis was born in Mineola, New York, graduated from the University of Virginia and went to Yale Law School. She clerked for Judge Diana Gribbon Motz on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She was an assistant federal public defender in Maryland and adjunct professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.
Xinis practiced with the Baltimore firm of Murphy Falcon & Murphy, according to her biography with the federal courts system, and handled complex civil actions and other matters in state and federal court.
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Meg Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP