By Luc Cohen and Jack Queen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -A U.S. appeals court urged the Trump administration on Thursday to back off from its escalating confrontation with the judiciary, warning that both the executive and judicial branches risk losing public confidence.
In a strongly worded unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel rejected the administration’s request to stop a judge from probing what they had done to secure the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a migrant who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.
The judges, part of the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said the executive branch and the courts were “grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.”
“We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson.
Wilkinson is an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, a Republican like Trump.
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in Greenbelt, Maryland, this week ordered U.S. officials to provide documents and answer questions under oath about what they had done to secure the return of Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly sent to El Salvador on March 15.
The administration has acknowledged Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who had been living in Maryland, was deported to El Salvador in error but has since said it cannot get him back.
The appeals court questioned that assertion, writing that the Trump administration was claiming a right to “stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process.”
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” the opinion said.
Justice Department lawyers had asked the Fourth Circuit to pause Xinis’ order that the government facilitate his return.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen and Jack Queen in New York; additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston Editing by Howard Goller, Noeleen Walder and Deepa Babington)
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