{"id":116110,"date":"2025-04-22T16:25:31","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T00:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/04\/22\/doj-makes-up-fake-supreme-court-quote-about-deportation-hoping-no-one-notices\/"},"modified":"2025-04-22T16:25:31","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T00:25:31","slug":"doj-makes-up-fake-supreme-court-quote-about-deportation-hoping-no-one-notices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/2025\/04\/22\/doj-makes-up-fake-supreme-court-quote-about-deportation-hoping-no-one-notices\/","title":{"rendered":"DOJ Makes Up Fake Supreme Court Quote About Deportation Hoping No One Notices"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The United States Department of Justice continues its effort to keep Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran slave camp even though they\u2019ve already admitted in front of multiple<\/em> tribunals up to and including the Supreme Court that he was deported in error. The DOJ\u2019s most recent contribution to their oeuvre of excrement is a set of interrogatory responses filed in the district court proceeding.<\/p>\n

And I have a theory how it happened\u2026<\/p>\n

Now, we\u2019re going to get a little technical here, but the term for the DOJ\u2019s response is a \u201clie.\u201d Or more properly, an embarrassing and contemptuous lie.<\/p>\n

For anyone familiar with The Royal Tenenbaums<\/em><\/a>,\u201d the government\u2019s response is basically \u201ceveryone knows the Supreme Court unanimously ordered us to \u2018facilitate Abrego Garcia\u2019s release from custody,\u2019 what this filing we\u2019re signing as officers of the court presupposes is\u2026 \u2018maybe they didn\u2019t?’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n

I am utterly baffled by the highlighted part, which isn’t even a quote from the Supreme Court’s order. What are they doing?!<\/p>\n

\u2014 Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor.bsky.social)<\/a> 2025-04-22T12:52:19.513Z<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

For the record, the Supreme Court\u2019s order reads:<\/p>\n

\n

The order properly requires the Government to \u201cfacilitate\u201d Abrego Garcia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is \u2014 notably \u2014 NOT \u201ctake all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United State<\/em>.\u201d Also\u2026 \u201cUnited STATE\u201d?!?! That\u2019s an embarrassing \u201c[sic]\u201d in any circumstances but for the United States Department of Justice you\u2019d think they\u2019d get it right because it\u2019s RIGHT THERE IN THEIR NAME. <\/p>\n

They put \u201cemphasis added\u201d on a quote that ISN\u2019T IN THE ORDER! <\/p>\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s 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 \u201crelease from custody in El Salvador\u201d to \u201creturn\u2026 to the United States\u201d \u2014 SORRY, \u201cUnited State\u201d \u2014 in a bid to move the goalposts all the way out of the stadium.<\/p>\n

How did this happen? There is the theory that they\u2019re begging for contempt<\/a>. That would provide an opportunity for a massive constitutional showdown when Trump attempts to pardon the DOJ out from under contempt \u2014 an untested, mostly academic theory<\/a> \u2014 while the judiciary could argue that its inherent contempt powers descend from the English common law. It could also be Hanlon\u2019s Razor<\/a> and the DOJ lawyers willing to sign their names to this case are just remarkably stupid.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Or Grok \u2014 now with \u201call court cases<\/a>!\u201d \u2014 or whatever other consumer-grade generative AI the DOJ has farmed out its work to. Hear me out\u2026 it\u2019s 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<\/em> it? That takes an extra level of failure in legal research.<\/p>\n

And whoever put this together took that fake quote and decided to add emphasis to it, meaning they cited the Supreme Court \u2014 technically the Justice Sotomayor separate opinion itself quoting the order \u2014 but never bothered to check the quote against the actual opinion. That\u2019s how every generative AI sanctions case has happened!<\/a><\/p>\n

How would they have gotten a broken quote? Maybe by framing their query as \u201ccan you give me the exact quote where the Supreme Court said the government has to facilitate his return?\u201d A faulty prompt can generate a faulty answer. Or maybe it\u2019s because the administration keeps going out and pretending the Court said \u201creturn\u201d not \u201crelease\u201d \u2014 and the mainstream media\u2019s adoption of that frame<\/a> \u2014 muddying the record for the hapless generative AI model. <\/p>\n

Either way, garbage in, garbage out. <\/p>\n

This theory also lends significance to the goofy \u201cUnited State\u201d typo if the Justice Department tried to copy and paste out of ChatGPT and missed the last letter\u2026 something almost everyone has done.<\/p>\n

Is this speculation? Sure.<\/p>\n

But while Hanlon\u2019s Razor is powerful, Occam\u2019s<\/em> Razor suggests that a DOJ lawyer wouldn\u2019t get a quote blatantly wrong if it copied and pasted it from the text of the actual order\u2026 but they would if they weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

And, in that sense, maybe it\u2019s both Hanlon and Occam together.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post DOJ Makes Up Fake Supreme Court Quote About Deportation Hoping No One Notices<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The United States Department of Justice continues its effort to keep Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran slave camp even though they\u2019ve already admitted in front of multiple<\/em> tribunals up to and including the Supreme Court that he was deported in error. The DOJ\u2019s most recent contribution to their oeuvre of excrement is a set of interrogatory responses filed in the district court proceeding.<\/p>\n

And I have a theory how it happened\u2026<\/p>\n

Now, we\u2019re going to get a little technical here, but the term for the DOJ\u2019s response is a \u201clie.\u201d Or more properly, an embarrassing and contemptuous lie.<\/p>\n

For anyone familiar with The Royal Tenenbaums<\/em><\/a>,\u201d the government\u2019s response is basically \u201ceveryone knows the Supreme Court unanimously ordered us to \u2018facilitate Abrego Garcia\u2019s release from custody,\u2019 what this filing we\u2019re signing as officers of the court presupposes is\u2026 \u2018maybe they didn\u2019t?’\u201d<\/p>\n

For the record, the Supreme Court\u2019s order reads:<\/p>\n

\n

The order properly requires the Government to \u201cfacilitate\u201d Abrego Garcia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Which is \u2014 notably \u2014 NOT \u201ctake all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United State<\/em>.\u201d Also\u2026 \u201cUnited STATE\u201d?!?! That\u2019s an embarrassing \u201c[sic]\u201d in any circumstances but for the United States Department of Justice you\u2019d think they\u2019d get it right because it\u2019s RIGHT THERE IN THEIR NAME. <\/p>\n

They put \u201cemphasis added\u201d on a quote that ISN\u2019T IN THE ORDER! <\/p>\n

The Supreme Court\u2019s 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 \u201crelease from custody in El Salvador\u201d to \u201creturn\u2026 to the United States\u201d \u2014 SORRY, \u201cUnited State\u201d \u2014 in a bid to move the goalposts all the way out of the stadium.<\/p>\n

How did this happen? There is the theory that they\u2019re begging for contempt<\/a>. That would provide an opportunity for a massive constitutional showdown when Trump attempts to pardon the DOJ out from under contempt \u2014 an untested, mostly academic theory<\/a> \u2014 while the judiciary could argue that its inherent contempt powers descend from the English common law. It could also be Hanlon\u2019s Razor<\/a> and the DOJ lawyers willing to sign their names to this case are just remarkably stupid.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ChatGPT.<\/p>\n

Or Grok \u2014 now with \u201call court cases<\/a>!\u201d \u2014 or whatever other consumer-grade generative AI the DOJ has farmed out its work to. Hear me out\u2026 it\u2019s 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<\/em> it? That takes an extra level of failure in legal research.<\/p>\n

And whoever put this together took that fake quote and decided to add emphasis to it, meaning they cited the Supreme Court \u2014 technically the Justice Sotomayor separate opinion itself quoting the order \u2014 but never bothered to check the quote against the actual opinion. That\u2019s how every generative AI sanctions case has happened!<\/a><\/p>\n

How would they have gotten a broken quote? Maybe by framing their query as \u201ccan you give me the exact quote where the Supreme Court said the government has to facilitate his return?\u201d A faulty prompt can generate a faulty answer. Or maybe it\u2019s because the administration keeps going out and pretending the Court said \u201creturn\u201d not \u201crelease\u201d \u2014 and the mainstream media\u2019s adoption of that frame<\/a> \u2014 muddying the record for the hapless generative AI model. <\/p>\n

Either way, garbage in, garbage out. <\/p>\n

This theory also lends significance to the goofy \u201cUnited State\u201d typo if the Justice Department tried to copy and paste out of ChatGPT and missed the last letter\u2026 something almost everyone has done.<\/p>\n

Is this speculation? Sure.<\/p>\n

But while Hanlon\u2019s Razor is powerful, Occam\u2019s<\/em> Razor suggests that a DOJ lawyer wouldn\u2019t get a quote blatantly wrong if it copied and pasted it from the text of the actual order\u2026 but they would if they weren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

And, in that sense, maybe it\u2019s both Hanlon and Occam together.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Headshot\"Joe Patrice<\/a>\u00a0is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer<\/a>. Feel free to\u00a0email<\/a> any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0or Bluesky<\/a> if you\u2019re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The United States Department of Justice continues its effort to keep Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadoran slave camp even though they\u2019ve already admitted in front of multiple tribunals up to and including the Supreme Court that he was deported in error. The DOJ\u2019s most recent contribution to their oeuvre of excrement is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-above_the_law"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xira.com\/p\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}