The Rachel Maddow Show
'They can't hide the ball': Judge cracks the whip on Trump lawyers in deportation case
Wed, 16 Apr 2025
Trump administration lawyers are running out of excuses to avoid being accountable for the rights and whereabouts of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland immigrant father who was improperly deported and sentenced without due process to an indeterminate amount of time in a prison in El Salvador. Rina Gandhi, and attorney for Mr. Abrego Garcia, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the judge is pinning down the Trump lawyers for answers and accountability.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Thanks to you at home for joining us here this hour. Really happy to have you here. So Harvard is standing up and fighting against Trump's threats and attacks against universities. They are fighting instead of making concessions and giving in. Today, yet another law firm that Trump targeted has won against him in court. This time, it was the firm Sussman Godfrey.
The judge called what Trump is doing in threatening this firm, quote, a shocking abuse of power. The judge blocked Trump from essentially continuing to go after the firm. Not to state the obvious or anything, but that firm won that ruling because they chose to fight him instead of making concessions to him and giving in.
In fact, every law firm that has fought Trump's attacks in court thus far has won. And that makes it really embarrassing to be one of the law firms that chose not to fight him, right? I mean, you didn't have to give in. You would have won in court if you'd fought it, but you gave in anyway. Bad call, right? Why would anyone hire you to fight for them on anything ever? Save yourself.
Save your firm. Get out of your so-called deal with Trump and fight back. Because, hey, look, everybody who's fighting back is winning. Whereas in the meantime, you've destroyed your law firm's reputation for eternity. Again, until you change your mind.
Today, also, the federal judge, hearing the case of Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, told the Trump administration that they do not have the option to disobey the court's order to return Mr. Abrego-Garcia to the United States. We will have more on that in a moment. It was a very dramatic confrontation in court today. Tonight, we've got tens of thousands of people turning out right now on a Tuesday.
to see Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in two back-to-back anti-Trump rallies they are holding in Bakersfield and then in Folsom, California today. Tens of thousands of people turning up for these two events. Again, these guys turned out 56,000 people over two nights in L.A. and Salt Lake City just this weekend.
Now they are tearing up basically Central California as we speak. I mean, all this stuff happening on one day. It's on. It is absolutely on. And we're going to have more on all of those stories over the course of the hour tonight. So like I said, I'm very, very happy that you're here. It's a big show, especially for Tuesday. It feels like a big show. It feels like a Friday already.
But we're going to start tonight with something that is quite different. We're starting tonight with a whistleblower story and a whistleblower who is here tonight live along with his attorney. And let me tell you a little bit why we are starting with this story.
So we've been focusing a lot on the way that people are standing up to try to block what Trump is doing, to try to show that they disagree with Trump, to show their resistance to what he's trying to do. And I think that's the real story in the country. But because we've been really focusing on that, we sometimes don't get into the nitty gritty of the sort of strategy of what Trump is doing.
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Chapter 2: What are the allegations against the Trump administration regarding the deportation case?
Chapter 3: How is the judge responding to the Trump administration's actions?
But there's no... there's no proof of who that was or if in fact that was, you know, a foreign intelligence service or even a foreign actor, right? It was just a Russian IP address, right?
So there are some caveats, but to the effect, yes, it was the same geolocation multiple times. And it's just one of the small factors that adds up to the bigger picture. You know, you have one of these, you see, you consider it maybe a fluke, but you have 40 or 50 of these indicators and the bigger picture becomes clear.
Let me ask you about the threat that you received, Dan. You and your colleagues at NLRB had decided to pursue a formal investigation into what you regarded as a breach of the data and systems at your agency. You prepared a request to CISA at the Department of Homeland Security to help you with that investigation. And then you received a threat at your home where you live?
Where I hadn't lived for too long either. I've only been there two months. The only place that I've actually updated that address is in the OPM database for my payroll with the government. That's really, I haven't even updated my bank card yet.
Can you tell us about the character of the threat?
I think it was vague enough to not be... Can I just... Yeah, I can jump in there for Dan because this is actually quite difficult for him to talk about because it is quite personal. So this is a letter who somebody had drafted. And within the letter, there was specific information about Dan that can only be obtained through, for example, internal databases within the government.
Because it's not anything—we've had individuals conduct an investigation. We've had our own investigative team conduct an investigation to see whether or not any of this is really easily accessible online, and it's not. And so there is information that very few individuals would know.
It could be something that was submitted to the government on an SF-86, a security clearance background investigation, etc. And the fact that he's only been at this residence for two months or less— We have that. We have the fact that somebody literally figured out where he lives, taped this note to his door, and flew a drone above him while he was walking his dog.
I mean, I've only seen this once or twice in the years where I've represented whistleblowers or conducted investigations like this. When I saw this, this made me pause and get concerned about Dan and what's going on.
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