A conservative judge makes the case: Time is running out on American democracy

Not since the American revolution, when Paul River In the streets of Boston And Thomas Pine Published The famous healthy sense, you have the Americans It received a more urgent awakening invitation to the danger that is more looming on their freedom than they did this week. This time, the alert came from any revolutionary, but a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan.

J. Harvie WilkinsonA judge with great respect and depth in the United States’ Appeal Court for the Fourth Circle, wrote about the plight of Kilmar Garcia, who It was accidentally deported By the Trump administration last month. Despite the orders of the court, the administration refuses to raise a finger to this right.

In reference to her challenge to the Supreme Court, Wilkinson reminded his readers that “the rule of law … (is) is vital to American ethics.” He pointed out that the Jarisia case provides “a unique opportunity to install this value and summon the best in us while there is still time.”

Time, Wilkinson warned against running out of American democracy. His words invite his colleagues in the Supreme Court, Republican members of Congress, business leaders, law firms, universities, and citizens to demand the return of Garcia and to stand in almost daily violations of power by the Trump administration.

For decades, eighty -year -old Wilkinson was loved by the conservative legal movement. President Ronald Reagan appointed him in the bench in 1983 He has Long record as a discount for miscarriage and legal legitimacy to gay marriage. he It is rumored to be in the brief list To replace the late president in the United States, William Renkwist. More importantly, he regularly defended the presidential authority.

In the 2003 case, which has some strange similarities with Garcia, Wilkinson Write The New York Times The name “A great legal victory” by the administration of President George W. Bush. He ruled that “the head of the war time can detain the United States to an indefinite time that was captured as an enemy fight in the battlefield and this person denies reaching a lawyer.” The judge said: “It was inappropriate for the federal courts to be deeply fulfilled in the detention of Yasser Asmour Hamdi, the 22 -year -old Saudi -born, who was captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan and is now imprisoning him in Brej Military in Norfolk, Virginia.”

This brings us back to the Garcia issue.

Garcia illegally entered this country in 2011 and obtained a temporary preventive position in 2019, during the first period of Trump. On March 12 this year, it is He was “He was pulled while driving, who is 5 years old in the back seat. He was told that the migration situation has changed.” Thirteen days later, without trial of any kind, Garcia was transferred to El Salvador and imprisoned as a terrorist member of the MS-13 Street gang.

As a column writer in the New York Times Ezra Klein Explain“There was no evidence, anywhere, provided by anyone, indicating that Abyerigo Garcia poses a threat to anyone in this country.”

Filed a lawsuit against Garcia’s lawyers, who sought an order to return him to the United States. They claimed that the government has violated its right to the due legal procedures, the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Law, the Administrative Procedures Law, and the Corbus Celebrity Law. Federal boycott judge Paula Shenis Granted Their request. The federal government has directed “to facilitate and prepare the return of the prosecutor, Kilmar Armando, to Garcia to the United States by 11:59 pm on Monday, April 7, 2025” since then, the fourth circle and its Supreme Court Support Xinis arrangement.

The Supreme Court unanimously said that Shinis’s order “requires the government correctly that” facilitating “the release of Abrago Garcia from the nursery in El Salvador and to ensure the treatment of his case because it was not incorrectly sent to El Salvador.” There was no doubt in its intention, the court returned the case to Shinis, under the direction of “the provincial court must continue to ensure that the government is up to its obligations to follow the law.”

When Xinis acted to implement this directive, the administration again appealed to the fourth department in search of an emergency residence to prevent it from doing so.

Enter Judge Wilkenson.

His opinion, rejecting their request, is a masterpiece of legal writing, clear, free from unnecessary terms, and to this point. It is written for the current moment and the future provisions of history.

Wilkenson began praising “the efforts of the beautiful boycott judge who is trying to implement the recent Supreme Court decision.” Thus, he pushed any effort to the Trump administration to replace it.

Moreover, the resistance of the administration’s efforts to throw sand in the justice mechanism, Wilkinson described the Garcia case as easy and the court’s duty to be “clear.” “It is difficult in some cases to reach the heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not difficult at all.”

This is because “the government affirms the right to get rid of the population of this country in foreign prisons without the similarity of the legal measures that are the basis of our constitutional system. Moreover, it claims in essence that it is because it got rid of the reservation that there is nothing that can be done.”

“This,” continued, “it must be shocking not only for the judges, but to the intuitive sense of freedom that the Americans are still far from the courts are still dear.”

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Wilkinson insisted that the government challenged the country’s highest court by “carrying out (B) mainly.

Quoting the Supreme Court’s decision that the government has an obligation to facilitate the return of Garcia, Wilkenson presented a simple lesson in the grammar of the language. “Facilitation” is an active act. It requires taking steps because the Supreme Court has completely clarified. “

Our fate has linked Garcia by reminding his readers that if the government moves away from depriving him of due legal procedures and making him disappear from this country, he may never do the same thing for any of us. In the end, as if he was leading us to Paul River and Thomas Payne, Wilkenson said that the deportation of Garcia threatens to “the extent of the rule of law to chaos and distort the values ​​that the Americans stand from the opinions and persuasion always.”

What Payne said in his time is also true today. He wrote: “The current situation of America,” is really concerned for every man who is able to think. ”

But in a dangerous time, Payne continued, “Instead of staring at each other with a suspicious or doubtful curiosity, let each of us hold the hand of the heart of the heart, and unite in drawing a line, which is buried in the forgetfulness of every previous dispute.”

Using words that have a special meaning today, Payne asked his contemporaries to remember that in America, only “the law is the king” and to be “supporters (supporters), virtuous for human rights.”