Dual Orders Over Trump Deportations Edge Courts Closer to Confrontation With White House

After the Trump administration rushed nearly 240 Central American immigrants onto charter planes last month and flew them — most without hearings — to a prison in El Salvador, the courts responded with a flurry of orders more or less instructing Trump officials to figure out a way to give them the due process they had been denied.

But for much of the past few weeks, the White House has dodged, dragged its feet and found other ways to defy some of those orders. And that has led to a remarkable development.

Two federal judges in Washington and Maryland handling cases arising from the deportation flights have now declared that they have reason to believe that Trump officials have acted in bad faith by failing to comply with their decrees. To get to the bottom of the obfuscation, the judges have made plans for searching inquiries into who in the administration may have been responsible.

The threat of the investigations has come at an especially fraught moment: just as President Trump and his advisers are increasingly butting heads with the courts and are testing the traditional balance of power between the judicial and executive branches. The jurists’ dual moves have brought the two coequal parts of the government closer than ever to an open confrontation.

The prospect of that rift has become so glaring that it made its way on Thursday into an almost mournful order regarding one of the deportation cases written by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative Reagan appointee, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Virginia.

The purpose of the order was to reaffirm that the White House needed to play a more active role in seeking the release of a Maryland man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was flown last month to a prison in El Salvador, despite a court order expressly forbidding him from being sent there.