The United States Department of Justice continues its effort to keep Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran slave camp even though they’ve already admitted in front of multiple tribunals up to and including the Supreme Court that he was deported in error. The DOJ’s most recent contribution to their oeuvre of excrement is a set of interrogatory responses filed in the district court proceeding.
And I have a theory how it happened…
Now, we’re going to get a little technical here, but the term for the DOJ’s response is a “lie.” Or more properly, an embarrassing and contemptuous lie.
For anyone familiar with The Royal Tenenbaums,” the government’s response is basically “everyone knows the Supreme Court unanimously ordered us to ‘facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody,’ what this filing we’re signing as officers of the court presupposes is… ‘maybe they didn’t?'”
For the record, the Supreme Court’s order reads:
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.
Which is — notably — NOT “take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United State.” Also… “United STATE”?!?! That’s an embarrassing “[sic]” in any circumstances but for the United States Department of Justice you’d think they’d get it right because it’s RIGHT THERE IN THEIR NAME.
They put “emphasis added” on a quote that ISN’T IN THE ORDER!
The Supreme Court’s order is, I believe, 217 words. The relevant sentence is almost 20 percent of the whole fucking order. Yet, the Trump administration seemingly could not be bothered to sift through the order to find the right quote. Instead they change “release from custody in El Salvador” to “return… to the United States” — SORRY, “United State” — in a bid to move the goalposts all the way out of the stadium.
How did this happen? There is the theory that they’re begging for contempt. That would provide an opportunity for a massive constitutional showdown when Trump attempts to pardon the DOJ out from under contempt — an untested, mostly academic theory — while the judiciary could argue that its inherent contempt powers descend from the English common law. It could also be Hanlon’s Razor and the DOJ lawyers willing to sign their names to this case are just remarkably stupid.
It’s ChatGPT.
Or Grok — now with “all court cases!” — or whatever other consumer-grade generative AI the DOJ has farmed out its work to. Hear me out… it’s one thing for a lawyer to misrepresent a Supreme Court quote (issued this month in the very same matter, mind you). A likely sanctionable error in itself, but to misquote it? That takes an extra level of failure in legal research.
And whoever put this together took that fake quote and decided to add emphasis to it, meaning they cited the Supreme Court — technically the Justice Sotomayor separate opinion itself quoting the order — but never bothered to check the quote against the actual opinion. That’s how every generative AI sanctions case has happened!
How would they have gotten a broken quote? Maybe by framing their query as “can you give me the exact quote where the Supreme Court said the government has to facilitate his return?” A faulty prompt can generate a faulty answer. Or maybe it’s because the administration keeps going out and pretending the Court said “return” not “release” — and the mainstream media’s adoption of that frame — muddying the record for the hapless generative AI model.
Either way, garbage in, garbage out.
This theory also lends significance to the goofy “United State” typo if the Justice Department tried to copy and paste out of ChatGPT and missed the last letter… something almost everyone has done.
Is this speculation? Sure.
But while Hanlon’s Razor is powerful, Occam’s Razor suggests that a DOJ lawyer wouldn’t get a quote blatantly wrong if it copied and pasted it from the text of the actual order… but they would if they weren’t using legal research software to draft their brief and instead turned it over to a hallucination engine primed to give its MAGA prompt the answer it wanted.
And, in that sense, maybe it’s both Hanlon and Occam together.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.