By MICHAEL KUNZELMAN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s claim that it can’t 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 Thursday in a scathing ruling in favor of the Maryland man.
A three-judge panel from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously refused to suspend 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.
The panel said Republican President Donald Trump’s 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,” they wrote.
The Justice Department appealed after U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis on Tuesday ordered sworn testimony by at least four officials who work for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.
The 4th Circuit panel unanimously denied the government’s request for a stay of Xinis’ order while they appeal. Its opinion says the executive and judicial branches of the federal government “come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.”
“This is a losing proposition all around,” they wrote. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions.”
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