Associated Press: "Appeals court calls Trump administration’s defiance over mistakenly deported man ‘shocking’"

The Trump administration’s claim that it canot do anything to free Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison and return him to the U.S. “should be shocking,” a federal appeals court said today in a ruling.   The three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously refused to stay a judge’s decision to order sworn testimony by Trump administration officials to determine if they complied with her instruction to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

 

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote the order. His Federalist Society bio states that he " is an Article III federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. He joined the Court in 1984 after being nominated by President Ronald Reagan."

 

Judge Wilkinson was joined  by Judge Robert Bruce King (appointed by President Bill Clinton) and Judge Stephanie Dawn Thacker (appointed by President Barack Obama).

 

The order reads in part:

 

"It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. 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. 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." (bold added).

 

KJ