Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson in an opinion for a panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote some pointed criticisms of the Trump Administration’s handling of the Abrego Garcia deportation.
4th-circuitA federal appeals court on Thursday excoriated the Trump administration for its conduct in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongly deported from Maryland to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
The administration 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,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson in an opinion for a panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done,” he wrote. “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, a Reagan appointee who has been on the bench for 41 years, is one of the nation’s most prominent conservative appellate judges. His seven-page opinion is the latest — and most scorching — judicial rebuke of the Trump administration’s aggressive moves to sidestep court orders in high-profile immigration cases.
Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg found probable cause to hold administration officials in contempt for defying an order to halt deportations of people deemed “alien enemies.” And U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis scolded the administration for having done “nothing” to comply with her order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from El Salvador.
Wilkinson and the two other judges on the 4th Circuit panel rejected the administration’s appeal of an April 10 order from Xinis directing the administration to “take all available steps” to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. “as soon as possible.”
Wilkinson zeroed in on the Justice Department’s admission that it had “mistakenly” deported Abrego Garcia.
“Why then should it not make what was wrong, right?” Wilkinson wrote.
Abrego Garcia was detained and quickly flown to El Salvador last month despite a 2019 court order that barred the government from deporting him there because of the risk that he could be targeted by a local gang. The Supreme Court said his deportation was “illegal” in a decision upholding Xinis’ directive requiring the U.S. to facilitate his release.
But the administration has apparently taken no concrete steps to bring him back.
Instead, Trump administration officials have claimed they have no power to do so now that he is under the jurisdiction of El Salvador. On Tuesday, Xinis ordered an “intense” two-week inquiry into the administration’s defiance.
Wilkinson warned of a dangerously slippery slope on the horizon. “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” he wrote.
“And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?”
Starting to think we need two sorts of open threads. Normal open threads, and threads for ‘current legal status of gulag rendition’, which keeps changing so fast no one can really write an article on it.
Anyway, hours after _this_ was posted, the Surpreme Court, at one in the morning on a Saturday, issued a blanket TRO saying the administration cannot rendition anyone from the Northern Distract of Texas under the AEA. This, notable, does not have anything to do with Abrego Garcia, it’s because the ACLU filed a blanket habeas for _everyone_ who is going to renditioned. (You know, those people who got the forms the other day.)
https://www.lawdork.com/p/supreme-court-aea-april-late-night-order
This is in addition to the one TRO that already existed within the Southern District of Texas stopping the same thing. (Which I think is the one in the article? And also the one that is currently being looked into for contempt because they did not turn the planes around as the judge ordered.)
It is worth pointing out that the Trump Administration is almost out of jurisdiction shopping. This is the jurisdiction _they wanted_ and they can’t even get favorable results from it.
It is completely absurd that no one will issue a nation-wide injunction about this.Report
Ten second news has this up now Report
A reminder of where we are:
The habeas filings have all followed the Supreme Court’s 5-4 order in Trump v. J.G.G. on April 7 holding that AEA challenges had to be brought in habeas actions — and vacating the prior classwide order, brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, blocking AEA proclamation-based removals nationwide.
As such, a habeas petition was filed by lawyers from the ACLU on behalf of two petitioners and a “putative class” in the Northern District of Texas on April 16. As with the other recent filings, the aim was for this to protect anyone from AEA proclamation-removal within the district. That is the putative, or proposed, class.
I.e., this is the ACLU following along with the nonsense idea that ‘The government can rendition these people without a trial as long as they are warned they are going to be renditioned and do not manage to contact a lawyer and get a habaes petition filed fast enough, and no we won’t be specific about the time limitation there or whether or not they can even contact a lawyer’.
The ACLU apparently took that as a challenge, and it appears that _enough_ people in the government take issue with this enough to be leaking information and that a flight was imminent from Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. Today. On Saturday. So they filed a TRO Friday evening, it got appealed up the chain fast enough, and the Supreme Court had to step in at fricking one in the morning.
‘We can send individuals off to be tortured with no due process, and no way to ever give them due process, unless, and only unless, some lawyer learns we’re going to do that and manages to get a response from the actual literal Supreme Court faster than we can get a plane off the ground.’
…and yet the ACLU pulled it off.
This is an INSANE way to run a legal system.Report