A federal judge on Tuesday said she will require the Trump administration to produce records and sworn answers about the U.S. government’s attempts, or lack thereof, to return a Maryland resident who was apprehended by immigration authorities and illegally sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

The decision from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, where she left open the possibility of a contempt ruling against the Trump administration, marks another escalation in the legal showdown with the White House. The case has widespread implications, with Justice Department lawyers arguing that the judge lacks the authority to force them to coordinate with the Salvadoran government to bring Kilmar Abrego García back to the United States.

“It’s going to be two weeks of intense discovery,” Xinis told Justice Department attorneys at the hearing.

The Trump administration has repeatedly bucked Xinis’s orders to provide information about what it is doing to facilitate the return of Abrego García, 29. That tone of defiance was underscored this week by President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during his visit to the White House, where he and Trump administration officials repeated unsubstantiated claims that the sheet-metal apprentice who fled El Salvador as a teenager has ties to a transnational gang.

“There is never going to be a world in which this is an individual who’s going to live a peaceful life in Maryland, because he is a foreign terrorist and a MS-13 gang member,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday, echoing those claims hours before the hearing. Abrego García’s lawyers have disputed the claims, and he appears to have no criminal record in the United States or El Salvador.

During the hearing, Xinis showed little patience for arguments from Justice Department lawyer Drew Ensign that an order from the Supreme Court last week left space for White House interpretations, such as that the order does not require the administration to attempt to bring about Abrego García’s release from custody in El Salvador.

The Trump administration, Xinis said in a written order after the hearing, is obligated “at a minimum, to take the steps available to them toward aiding, assisting, or making easier Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”

“But the record reflects that Defendants have done nothing at all,” she added.

Xinis said she will allow Abrego García’s lawyers to ask for documents and answers to specific questions, give the administration opportunities to object, and referee what they can’t agree on. Abrego García’s lawyers will be able to seek answers from those who have provided declarations in the case, including Joseph N. Mazzara, acting general counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, she said.

“If everyone is operating in good faith, this will get done in two weeks,” Xinis said. “If you’re not, that will be a fact in and of itself for this court to consider.”

Xinis pointedly left the possibility of a finding of contempt against administration officials on the table, saying the discovery will help her establish a record of the facts.

“If I make a finding of contempt, it will be based on the record before me,” she said.

Xinis said the discovery will move fast, adding that she is normally accommodating about lawyers’ vacations and other appointments. “But not this time.”

“We have to give process to both sides, but we’re going to move,” Xinis said. “There will be no tolerance for gamesmanship or grandstanding.”

The Trump administration has sought to center the case on unsubstantiated claims that Abrego García has ties to a clique of MS-13 that is based in Upstate New York, a place Xinis has noted Abrego García has never lived.

Administration officials have pointed to an immigration detention hearing in 2019 at which a judge declined to immediately release Abrego García because of gang-related allegations supplied by a police detective in Maryland’s Prince George’s County who, according to police sources, was later indicted for giving confidential case information to a commercial sex worker whom he was paying for sex.

The former detective, Ivan Mendez, pleaded guilty and received probation, according to court records. Efforts to reach Mendez on Tuesday were unsuccessful.

During the 2019 hearing, the immigration judge ordered that Abrego García be held pending a full hearing months later, at which a different judge ruled in his favor. That judge ordered him released and prohibited the U.S. government from sending him back to El Salvador — a humanitarian protection called “withholding of removal.”

Abrego García’s lawyers say he fled El Salvador when he was 16 to escape a gang’s extortion attempts.

Before Tuesday’s hearing, Abrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, spoke directly to her husband during a news conference outside the courthouse.

“Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong,” she said. “I haven’t forgotten about you.”

She added: “My heart aches for my husband.”

Xinis’s directives for the U.S. government to provide information are backed by an order from the Supreme Court’s decision last week, which said she had properly instructed the administration to facilitate Abrego García’s return. The high court’s order added that the government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” to carry out the lower court’s order.

The Supreme Court’s order largely affirmed an April 4 order by Xinis directing Trump administration officials to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego García’s return.

The administration has claimed the Supreme Court’s ruling as a victory, focusing on a line in the 9-0 decision that instructs the federal court in Maryland to act with “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

Given that deference, the Supreme Court expressed concern about Xinis’s instruction to “effectuate” Abrego García’s return. But the high court said Xinis’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.”

Federal officials have said the Supreme Court’s decision required only that the administration allow Abrego García to return should he be released by the government of El Salvador, not that they take steps to encourage El Salvador’s government to free him from its Terrorism Confinement Center, a mega-prison infamous for its harsh conditions where as many as 70 people are forced to share a cell.

“If Mr. Abrego García presents at a port of entry or the U.S. embassy, we will facilitate his return into the United States,” Ensign said at Tuesday’s hearing.

Xinis called it “stunning” that the administration has refused to ask El Salvador to release Abrego García, but said she has so far not ordered the administration to do so. “Because if you convince me that that would be to exceed my authority, then I will abide by the law,” she said. “Since we’re a country of laws, after all.”

During his White House visit Monday, Bukele said he would not release Abrego García.

“The question is preposterous,” Bukele said as he sat next to Trump. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) said he intends to leave for El Salvador on Wednesday in hopes of securing Abrego García’s release.

“It should be a priority of the U.S. government to secure his safe release, which is why tomorrow I am traveling to El Salvador,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “My hope is to visit Kilmar and check on his wellbeing and to hold constructive conversations with government officials around his release. We must urgently continue working to return Kilmar safely home to Maryland.”

After the hearing Tuesday, hundreds of people gathered outside the courthouse in support of Abrego García and his family — including members of the immigration advocacy group CASA, faith leaders, local lawmakers and residents concerned about the case’s implications for the state and the nation.

They chanted about due process, and when Justice Department attorneys emerged from the courthouse, a small contingent shouted “Shame!” repeatedly.

Rina Gandhi, an attorney for Abrego García, said that despite the judge’s decision to delay any potential contempt of court findings, “this is still a win and this is still progress.”

She pushed back on allegations from the Trump administration that Abrego García is a “terrorist” with MS-13 gang ties.

“That’s not what this case is about,” Gandhi said. “This case is about the government unlawfully, and admitting to unlawfully, removing the gentleman from this country, from Maryland, from his home, his family, his children, and taking no actions, no meaningful steps to fix that as ordered by the Supreme Court.”

She rejected an accusation from the White House that he has ties to human trafficking.

“I have seen no evidence to support that statement,” Gandhi said. “I don’t know where that came from.”

Gandhi said she was upset that the government had, in her opinion, “purposefully” read aloud in court — in front of his wife — its intention to again deport Abrego García were he to return to a U.S. port of entry.

“That is not how this works,” Gandhi said, adding that it is not the Department of Homeland Security that has the authority to do that, but an immigration judge.

Jasmine Hilton and Brianna Tucker contributed to this report.