Adam Serwer writes:

America has reached a very dangerous moment, as the Supreme Court’s indulgence of President Donald Trump’s belief in his own untrammeled authority collides with the justices’ expectation that he will abide by their decisions.

This evening, the Supreme Court upheld part of a lower-court decision ordering the Trump administration to seek to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom—as The Atlantic first reported—the administration has acknowledged it mistakenly dispatched to El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. Abrego Garcia, who came to the United States illegally but was allowed to stay after a judge ruled that he was likely to be persecuted by gangs in his native El Salvador, would be the first person publicly known to be released from CECOT.

“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the justices wrote in an unsigned order.

The fact that the order was issued without dissent was remarkable. The Roberts Court has indulged Trump at nearly every turn, first writing the anti-insurrection clause out of the Fourteenth Amendment and then foiling his federal prosecution by inventing a grant of presidential immunity with no basis in the text of the Constitution. Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have deployed a selective proceduralism to avoid directly confronting the Trump administration, one that contrasts with their alacrity in cases where they are seeking their preferred outcome. Yet the confrontation they sought to avoid has arrived nonetheless, and even the Trumpiest justices, such as Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, joined their colleagues in informing the Trump administration that what it had done was illegal and should be remedied. [Continue reading…]

The Daily Beast reports:

The Trump administration said it would not provide information on how it will get a wrongly deported Maryland dad home by a Friday morning deadline because the timeframe a judge imposed was “impracticable.”

In effect, the Department of Justice (DOJ) is openly defying a court order that requires it to provide details about 29-year-old Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts and how he will be brought back stateside.

Abrego Garcia was flown to a mega prison in El Salvador last month due to an “administrative error.” Despite the DOJ admitting its mistake, it argued it did not have the authority to bring Abrego Garcia home because he was now in the custody of El Salvador.

Maryland District Court Judge Paula Xinis, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, disagreed and ruled that Abrego Garcia must be returned stateside, where he has an American wife and child and was working legally as a sheet metal apprentice prior to being taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during what he believed to be a routine traffic stop. [Continue reading…]