“Asserting a right to stash residents”: Appeals court rebukes Trump DOJ’s Abrego Garcia defense

The Trump administration’s latest bid to keep mistakenly deported Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia in an El Salvadorian prison was swatted down in a federal appeals court on Thursday, intensifying the legal pressure to facilitate the Maryland man’s return.

In a Thursday ruling, Fourth Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III said the Trump administration was “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”

“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” the Reagan appointee wrote in a seven-page opinion, joined by two other judges.

Responding to the Trump administration’s plea to stay an order that it “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador, judges called the motion “extraordinary and premature,” noting the Supreme Court required that steps be taken.

“While we fully respect the Executive’s robust assertion of its Article II powers, we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision,” he added.

The Supreme Court unanimously agreed with a lower court’s ruling that the federal government must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, though justices disagreed with the finding that the feds must “effectuate” his return. Legal experts say the Trump administration’s reaction to the ruling could have chilling consequences for Americans and their due process rights.

Though Attorney General Pam Bondi has claimed Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang – or even a high-ranking leader, depending on the day you ask her – the government has been unwilling and unable to present evidence in any courtroom. The president has made attempts to distance himself from the case, claiming in a Thursday White House presser that he is “not involved in it.”

Wilkinson argued that the infighting between the judiciary and the executive branch will only serve to diminish both.

“This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy,” he wrote. “The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”