The Supreme Court’s cryptic ruling that America must “facilitate” the return of a Salvadorean national, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly deported last month, is an ambiguous decision that sets the stage for further clashes between the White House and the federal judiciary. 

The high court’s unsigned ruling Thursday night featured no dissents. It upheld the decision of a district court judge, Paula Xines, that Washington must “facilitate” the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who, the government concedes, was sent to El Salvador in error. The Department of Justice, though, argues that since Mr. Abrego Garcia is now on foreign soil, courts cannot mandate his return to America.

The Supreme Court instructs that Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case be “handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” Washington is ordered to “facilitate” his return, but the Nine explain that the “intended scope” of the lower court’s use of “effectuate” is “unclear and may exceed” its authority. The high court reminded Judge Xines of the “deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” 

Judge Xines insists that the Trump administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocked the conscience” by sending Mr. Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that even though he entered the country illegally, he was protected from deportation by virtue of a status known as “withholding from removal,” which protects those whose return to their native lands raises the specter of torture or violence. 

The Trump administration insists that he is a member of the MS-13 gang. Judge Xines found that claim to be specious and founded on “nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” as well as a “vague, unsubstantiated corroboration from a confidential informant.”

The Supreme Court contends that Judge Xines, who was appointed by President Obama, “clarify her directive” with respect to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return. The high court also held that the government “should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

The Fourth United States Appeals Court declined to freeze Judge Xines’s order telling the government to retrieve Mr. Abrego Garcia. One of the circuit riders, Stephanie Tucker, fumed that the government “has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States and remove him from the country without due process.” Judge Tucker called Washington’s position “unconscionable.”

America’s solicitor general, John Sauer, docketed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court seeking the reversal of Judge Xines’s order. He accused her of pursuing “district-court diplomacy” and asserts that under her logic “district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.”

The Supreme Court’s three liberals wrote separately to maintain that their colleagues should never have granted the administration’s emergency petition in the first place. Justice Sotomayor castigates the DOJ for working to “leave Abrego Garcia, a husband and father without a criminal record, in a Salvadoran prison for no reason recognized by the law.”  

In a statement following the Supreme Court’s ruling the DOJ declared that “as the Supreme Court correctly recognized, it is the exclusive prerogative of the president to conduct foreign affairs. By directly noting the deference owed to the executive branch, this ruling once again illustrates that activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to … conduct foreign policy.”