The Fourth United States Appeals Court’s scathing rebuke of the Trump administration’s efforts to deport a Salvadorean national, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, could push the Supreme Court — and Chief Justice Roberts, who leads the federal judiciary — closer to an outright confrontation with the 47th president. 

“A path of perfect lawlessness” is how Judge Harvie Wilkinson, named to the Fourth Circuit by President Reagan, described Mr. Trump’s approach to ensuring that Mr. Abrego Garcia remains in El Salvador. Mr. Abrego Garcia was on Thursday visited by Senator Van Hollen, though the nation’s president, Nayib Bukele, insists that the alleged member of the MS-13 gang will remain in custody.

The Trump administration wanted the Fourth Circuit to issue an order staying the command from a district court judge, Paula Xinis*, that the government make efforts toward returning Mr. Abrego Garcia to American soil after acknowledging in court filings that his deportation was in error. Senior administration officials now dispute that, with a presidential adviser, Stephen Miller, insisting that he was “the right person sent to the right place.”

Now the Fourth Circuit concludes that the “relief the government is requesting is both extraordinary and premature,” and that the appeals circuit will not not “micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision.” 

That decision, though, was a cryptic one that the Nine could soon have to revisit — it ordered the government to “facilitate” Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return, but not to “effectuate” it, a verb that connotes more resolute action. The Fourth Circuit reckons: “‘Facilitate’ is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear.”  

This panel of three jurists of the Fourth Circuit reckons that “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. 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.”

That kind of language appears primed to appeal to the high court. The panel, which could easily have dispatched the Department of Justice’s request to stop Judge Xinis, instead writes that the administration’s behavior “should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” The circuit riders insist that the government has done “nothing.”

The Fourth Circuit could be writing not only for the parties to the case — Mr. Abrego Gracia and the Trump administration — but also to Chief Justice Roberts, famed for his interest in the integrity of the federal judiciary. It was the chief who rebuked the Trump administration’s push to impeach Judge James Boasberg, who ruled against the administration in another immigration case concerning members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Judge Wilkinson writes: “Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy.” The jurist adds that “over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”

Judge Xinis has set an aggressive schedule — she said there will be “two weeks of intense discovery,” with an eye toward securing Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return. If the DOJ cannot find a high court to halt that process — either the full complement of the Fourth Circuit or the Supreme Court — the possibility of contempt proceedings like the ones Judge Boasberg appears set to launch could greet noncompliance.

On Friday, Attorney General Bondi, in a filing in the Tren de Aragua case, argued that “prosecuting criminal contempt is a task exclusively for the Executive Branch.” She cites the Supreme Court’s ruling that the executive branch, not the Judiciary, “makes arrests and prosecutes offenses on behalf of the United States.” The law, though, appears to countenance the appointment of a special prosecutor if the “interest of justice requires the appointment of another attorney.”

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Corrections: Judge Paula Xinis is the trial judge in the case. Van Hollen is the last name of the senator who visited El Salvador. Their names were misspelled in an earlier edition. El Salvador is a Central American nation whose coastline is on the Pacific Ocean. An earlier version misstated its geographical location.