By BEN FINLEY and MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press

A federal judge in Maryland will hear arguments Friday over whether the Trump administration can invoke the state secrets privilege to withhold information about bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States.

U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador in April and has since directed the administration to provide documents and testimony showing what it has done, if anything, to comply.

Trump administration lawyers claim many of those details are protected, including sensitive diplomatic negotiations. Revealing the specifics would harm national security because foreign governments “would be less likely to work cooperatively with the United States,” they argued in a brief to the court.

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers contend the administration hasn’t shown “the slightest effort” toward retrieving him after his mistaken deportation. And they point to President Donald Trump’s interview last month with ABC News, in which he said he could bring Abrego Garcia back but won’t.

FILE – President Donald Trump holds a document with notes about Kilmar Abrego Garcia as he speaks with reporters in the Oval Office of the White House, April 18, 2025, in Washington.(AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

“Even as the Government speaks freely about Abrego Garcia in public, in this litigation it insists on secrecy,” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers wrote to the court.

The focus of Friday’s hearing will be a legal doctrine that is more often used in cases involving the military and spy agencies. Xinis’s ruling could impact the central question looming over the case: Has the Trump administration followed her order to bring back Abrego Garcia?

The Trump administration deported the Maryland construction worker to El Salvador in March. The expulsion violated a U.S. immigration judge’s order in 2019 that shielded Abrego Garcia from deportation to his native country because he faced likely persecution by a local gang that had terrorized his family.

Abrego Garcia’s American wife sued, and Xinis ordered his return on April 4. The Supreme Court ruled on April 10 that the administration must work to bring him back.

Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, speaks during a news conference at CASA’s Multicultural Center in Hyattsville, Md., Friday, April 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Xinis later lambasted the administration for failing to explain what it has done to retrieve him and instructed the government to prove it was following her order. The Trump administration appealed, but the appeals court backed Xinis in a blistering order.

The debate over state secrets privilege is the latest development in the case.

In a legal brief filed Monday, Trump administration attorneys said they provided extensive information, including 1,027 pages of documents, to show they’re following the judge’s order.

They argued that Abrego Garcia’s legal team is now “attempting to pry into the privileged inner workings of the U.S. government apparatus and its communications with a foreign government.”

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“Nearly all the additional materials Plaintiffs demand are protected by the state secrets and deliberative process privileges and so cannot be produced,” U.S. attorneys wrote.

In their brief, Abrego Garcia’s attorneys urged the judge to be skeptical, writing that the state secrets privilege “is not for hiding governmental blunders or malfeasance.”

Abrego Garcia’s lawyers noted that U.S. attorneys claim in court to be following Xinis’s order, while “senior officials from the President on down were saying precisely the opposite to the American public.”

For example, they cited an April 16 statement from Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said, “He is not coming back to our country.”

“Over and over again, official statements by the Government — in congressional testimony, television interviews, and social media — confirm that producing this information would not imperil national security,” Abrego Garcia’s attorneys wrote.

The hearing is scheduled to start at 1 p.m. in federal court in Greenbelt.

Trump administration officials have said Abrego Garcia was deported based on a 2019 accusation from Maryland police that he was an MS-13 gang member. Abrego Garcia denied the allegation and was never charged with a crime, his attorneys said.

The administration later acknowledged that Abrego Garcia’s deportation to El Salvador was ” an administrative error ” because of the immigration judge’s 2019 order. But Trump and others have continued to insist that Abrego Garcia was in MS-13.

Minnesota United vs. St. Louis City

When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Allianz Field
Stream: MLS Season Pass on Apple TV
Radio: KSTP-AM, 1500
Weather: 47 degrees, cloudy, 12 mph southeast wind
Betting line: MNUFC minus-175; draw plus-310; St. Louis plus-450

Form: A lackluster MNUFC (6-4-3, 22 points) failed to produce a three-game winning streak in its third attempt of the season on Wednesday, falling 2-0 to 12th-place Houston. Sitting in 14th with 11 points, St. Louis (2-6-5) was booed at home after giving up a two-goal lead in the second half of a 2-2 draw with rival Kansas City midweek.

Recent matchups: Minnesota is 3-1-0 against St. Louis since they joined MLS in 2023, including 4-1 and 3-1 wins last season.

View: Eric Ramsay has put himself under the microscope. The second-year head coach’s drastic decision to make eight changes to the starting XI at Houston backfired, creating a necessity to get back on track — using more of a first-choice lineup — and getting a home win against a bottom-tier side.

Stat: MNUFC has made a bad habit of dropping points to downtrodden opponents. Besides the loss at Houston, the Loons have dropped two points in draws against L.A. Galaxy (15th in West), Kansas City (13th in West), Toronto (14th in East) and Dallas (10th in West).

Absences: Joseph Rosales (suspended) and Kipp Keller (hamstring) are out. Owen Gene (ankle) and Anthony Markanich are questionable.

Projected XI: In a 5-3-2 formation: FW Tani Oluwaseyi, FW Kelvin Yeboah; MF Joaquin Pereyra, MF Robin Lod, MF Wil Trapp; LWB Anthony Markanich, CB Nico Romero, CB Michael Boxall, CB Carlos Harvey, RWB Bongi Hlongwane; GK Dayne St. Clair.

Comparison: Both teams are dealing with scuffling strikers. Kelvin Yeboah hasn’t scored since March, a lull of seven matches that also came with an ankle injury. Joao Klauss hasn’t found the net in five straight MLS games, but the Brazilian did convert in the U.S. Open Cup two weeks ago.

Prediction: The Loons have bounced back from each of this season’s previous two losses with a win. For as inconsistent as they have been against struggling teams, they will stay true to that part of their form. Loons victorious at 2-0.

By MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press Technology Writer

Much like its creator, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was preoccupied with South African racial politics on social media this week, posting unsolicited claims about the persecution and “genocide” of white people.

His company, xAI, said Thursday night that an “unauthorized modification” led to its chatbot’s unusual behavior.

That means someone — the company didn’t say who — made a change that “directed Grok to provide a specific response on a political topic,” which “violated xAI’s internal policies and core values,” the company said.

A day earlier, Grok kept posting publicly about “white genocide” in response to users of Musk’s social media platform X who asked it a variety of questions, most having nothing to do with South Africa.

One exchange was about streaming service Max reviving the HBO name. Others were about video games or baseball but quickly veered into unrelated commentary on alleged calls to violence against South Africa’s white farmers. Musk, who was born in South Africa, frequently opines on the same topics from his own X account.

Computer scientist Jen Golbeck was curious about Grok’s unusual behavior so she tried it herself, sharing a photo she had taken at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show and asking, “is this true?”

“The claim of white genocide is highly controversial,” began Grok’s response to Golbeck. “Some argue white farmers face targeted violence, pointing to farm attacks and rhetoric like the ‘Kill the Boer’ song, which they see as incitement.”

The episode was the latest window into the complicated mix of automation and human engineering that leads generative AI chatbots trained on huge troves of data to say what they say.

“It doesn’t even really matter what you were saying to Grok,” said Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, in an interview Thursday. “It would still give that white genocide answer. So it seemed pretty clear that someone had hard-coded it to give that response or variations on that response, and made a mistake so it was coming up a lot more often than it was supposed to.”

Grok’s responses were deleted and appeared to have stopped proliferating by Thursday. Neither xAI nor X returned emailed requests for comment but on Thursday night, xAI said it had “conducted a thorough investigation” and was implementing new measures to improve Grok’s transparency and reliability.

Musk has spent years criticizing the “woke AI” outputs he says come out of rival chatbots, like Google’s Gemini or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has pitched Grok as their “maximally truth-seeking” alternative.

Musk has also criticized his rivals’ lack of transparency about their AI systems, fueling criticism in the hours between the unauthorized change — at 3:15 a.m. Pacific time Wednesday — and the company’s explanation nearly two days later.

“Grok randomly blurting out opinions about white genocide in South Africa smells to me like the sort of buggy behavior you get from a recently applied patch. I sure hope it isn’t. It would be really bad if widely used AIs got editorialized on the fly by those who controlled them,” prominent technology investor Paul Graham wrote on X.

Some asked Grok itself to explain, but like other chatbots, it is prone to falsehoods known as hallucinations, making it hard to determine if it was making things up.

Musk, an adviser to President Donald Trump, has regularly accused South Africa’s Black-led government of being anti-white and has repeated a claim that some of the country’s political figures are “actively promoting white genocide.”

Musk’s commentary — and Grok’s — escalated this week after the Trump administration brought a small number of white South Africans to the United States as refugees Monday, the start of a larger relocation effort for members of the minority Afrikaner group as Trump suspends refugee programs and halts arrivals from other parts of the world. Trump says the Afrikaners are facing a “genocide” in their homeland, an allegation strongly denied by the South African government.

In many of its responses, Grok brought up the lyrics of an old anti-apartheid song that was a call for Black people to stand up against oppression and has now been decried by Musk and others as promoting the killing of whites. The song’s central lyrics are “kill the Boer” — a word that refers to a white farmer.

Golbeck said it was clear the answers were “hard-coded” because, while chatbot outputs are typically very random, Grok’s responses consistently brought up nearly identical points. That’s concerning, she said, in a world where people increasingly go to Grok and competing AI chatbots for answers to their questions.

“We’re in a space where it’s awfully easy for the people who are in charge of these algorithms to manipulate the version of truth that they’re giving,” she said. “And that’s really problematic when people — I think incorrectly — believe that these algorithms can be sources of adjudication about what’s true and what isn’t.”

Musk’s company said it is now making a number of changes, starting with publishing Grok system prompts openly on GitHub so that “the public will be able to review them and give feedback to every prompt change that we make to Grok. We hope this can help strengthen your trust in Grok as a truth-seeking AI.”

Noting that its existing code review process had been circumvented, it also said it will “put in place additional checks and measures to ensure that xAI employees can’t modify the prompt without review.” The company said it is also putting in place a “24/7 monitoring team to respond to incidents with Grok’s answers that are not caught by automated systems,” for when other measures fail.