‘This should be shocking’: Judge levels Trump DOJ in scathing ruling
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected the Trump Department of Justice’s request to block orders that the Trump administration facilitate the release of wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The decision, which was written by Reagan-appointed Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, informed the administration that it would not “micromanage” the orders of Judge Paula Xinis, who has demanded that the administration provide daily updates its efforts to return Garcia to the United States.
What’s more, Wilkinson laid out the stakes of the Garcia case in bracing terms.
“The government is 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,” he wrote. “Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”
Wilkinson then referred to the recent Supreme Court decision ruling that the administration facilitate Garcia’s return, which he said took care to not infringe upon the powers of the executive branch as outlined by Article II in the United States Constitution.
“The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do essentially nothing,” the judge wrote. “It requires the government ‘to ‘”facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s 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. ‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”
Toward the end of his opinion, Wilkinson warned the Trump administration that they were harming their own powers by refusing to comply with court orders.
“The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions,” he wrote. “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.”