By Meg Kinnard
US district judge Paula Xinis is the last judge in disagreement with the Trump administration.
In a scathing reprimand, she described the government to act in “bad faith” by refusing to provide information on what she did to try to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a Salvador prison, where he was wrongly expelled and sends him back to the United States.
On the federal bench for almost a decade, Xinis has experienced a partisan decline since his appointment by Democratic President Barack Obama. She was also accused of being too hard with regard to the police during previous legal work for a police supervision office.
A look at which is Xinis and some of the other cases in which it was involved:
She oversees the ABREGO GARCIA affair
Earlier this month, Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. This decision was confirmed by the Supreme Court, although the judges declared that its order had to be clarified to ensure that it did not stop in the power of executive branches on foreign affairs.
“The ordinance correctly obliges the government to” facilitate “the release of Abrego Garcia de la Garde in Salvador and to ensure that his case is treated as it would have been if it had not been sent to Salvador,” said the court.
The administration conceded that it had made a mistake by sending Abrego Garcia to Salvador. But he argued that this could not do anything anymore to try to bring him back. The officials said that Greo Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang, although he has never been accused or found guilty of a crime. His lawyers said there was no evidence that he was a member of MS-13 or a gang.
Last week, Xinis said that she would order testimonies under oath by administration officials to determine if they had respected her orders to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. She declared that the officials had challenged an “Claire” Supreme Court order and that the managers of the White House and the president of El Salvador, saying that they were unable to bring him back, were like “two very wrong ships who spend in the night”.
She was tried in another high -level immigration case
In 2020, Xinis published a preliminary injunction interrupting parties of immigration rules promulgated under the first Trump administration who would have limited people looking for asylum in the United States to be able to obtain authorization to work.
Another court later canceled the rules entirely and the trial was rejected.
She had a controversial confirmation process
Obama appointed Xinis in March 2015 on the Maryland federal bench, where the courts had declared a “judicial emergency” due to the number of matters pending. The headquarters have been vacant since October 2014, the Senate slowing down his approval from the judges appointed by a president of the opposing party in the last months of the president’s last year.
Xinis obtained the support of Republican leaders, notably the president of the Senate’s judicial committee, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, then the head of the Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. But some conservatives estimated that Xinis was too difficult for the police in his legal career. They quoted his file as an examiner for the police complaints office in Washington, a civil surveillance entity.
His confirmation vote in May 2016 came shortly after the Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., Note that his law firm had represented Freddie Gray’s family, who died a year earlier after his neck was broken while he was handcuffed and chained to the back of a Baltimore police van. Gray’s death caused riots in this city, and his case was frequently mentioned in the national conversation on police brutality.
“She built a career in the treatment of proceedings against police and police services and dealing with complaints against the police,” said sessions, adding that the frequency with which she governed against the police made her uncomfortable.
It has law experience in the public and private sector
Xinis was born in Mineola, New York, graduated from the University of Virginia and went to the Yale Law School. She was a clerk for judge Diana Gribbon Motz at the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. She was a deputy federal public defender of Maryland and auxiliary professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Maryland Francis King Carey.
Xinis practiced with the Baltimore firm of Murphy Falcon & Murphy, according to his biography with the federal system of the courts, and has dealt with complex civil actions and other questions before the Court of State and Federal.
Meg Kinnard can be reached http://x.com/megkinnardap
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
