Appeals court won’t lift order to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s return in blistering opinion; The Hill, April 17, 2025

ZACH SCHONFELD  , The Hill; Appeals court won’t lift order to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s return in blistering opinion

"The 4th Circuit declined to put Xinis’s ruling on hold just one day after the administration filed the appeal, a swift order that came without waiting for Abrego Garcia’s lawyers to file their response.

“The relief the government is requesting is both extraordinary and premature. 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,” U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel... 

The Trump administration has acknowledged he was mistakenly deported due to an “administrative error” but contends the courts are powerless to intervene because the man is no longer in U.S. custody...

“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,” Wilkinson wrote.

“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 continued. “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, an appointee of former President Reagan, was joined on the panel by U.S. Circuit Judge Robert King, who is an appointee of former President Clinton, and U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanie Thacker, who is an appointee of former President Obama."

The Emergency Is Here; The New York Times, April 17, 2025

 Ezra Klein, The New York Times; The Emergency Is Here

"The emergency is here.

The crisis is now. It is not six months away. It is not another Supreme Court ruling away from happening. It’s happening now.

Perhaps not to you, not yet. But to others. Real people. We know their names. We know their stories.

The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin...

The Trump administration holds the view that anyone they send to El Salvador is beyond the reach of American law — they have been disappeared not only from our country but from our system — and from any protection or process that system affords.

In our prisons, prisoners can be reached by our lawyers, by our courts, by our mercy. In El Salvador, they cannot.

Names. Stories. Let me tell you one of their names, one of their stories, as best we know it."