A federal judge has instructed the Trump administration to explain why its failure to turn around flights carrying deportees to El Salvador did not violate his court order in a growing showdown between the judicial and executive branches.

U.S. Judge James E. Boasberg called the information the government had provided him so far “woefully insufficient.”

A federal judge in Maryland found that Elon Musk’s scrutiny of the agency’s data systems appeared to violate federal privacy laws.

In a scathing ruling on Thursday, a federal judge wrote that DOGE “essentially engaged in a fishing expedition at SSA, in search of a fraud epidemic, based on little more than suspicion.”

A federal judge has temporarily blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from Social Security Administration systems that hold personally identifiable data on millions of Americans