President Donald Trump is setting the country on a dangerous track in his repeated refusals to admit that the Maryland man his administration mistakenly sent to El Salvador is owed due process in the United States, according to the Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board.
The board on Friday went after Trump, who they bluntly told readers could benefit from the “sage advice” Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson delivered in a judicial opinion the Journal’s editors called “pointed and eloquent.”
“President Trump and the federal courts are heading toward a needless constitutional collision in the case of deportee Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia that would weaken both the executive and the judiciary,” the board wrote on Friday.
The critical stance from the conservative board came a day after the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Department of Justice’s request to block orders that the Trump administration facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release.
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“President Trump is handling this case so far with what might be called malicious compliance,” the board added. “He isn’t directly violating a court order, but he is testing the limits of what he can get away with legally. Judge Wilkinson’s opinion is respectfully calling out the gamesmanship.”
The Journal's board insisted that the legal showdown Trump created over the man who DOJ officials have admitted in court was sent to El Salvador by mistake is one the administration should not want to play out at the Supreme Court, “which may decide it has to take a firmer stand than it did the first time.”
“That raises the stakes and could leave Mr. Trump with the choice of backing down and complying with the courts, or defying them at some political cost,” the board concluded Friday.
The editors closed their opinion piece by cautioning the president that defying the courts over Abrego Garcia’s case “isn’t worth the political cost for him or the country.”
“He has far bigger issues on which he will need the Supreme Court in the next four years.”