Who is the author of crisis over the Trump administration’s decision to send the Chaldean Christians back to Iraq? We ask because of the order yesterday from a federal judge at Michigan to halt, at least temporarily, the deportation to Iraq of 200 such Christians. The Chaldean Christians, as the American Civil Liberties Union puts it in a filing in the case, are “widely recognized as targets of brutal persecution in Iraq.” Good for the ACLU.

Then again, too, it was just the other month that the ACLU was carrying on like there was no tomorrow over President Trump’s preparedness to grant priority on refugee visas to Christians fleeing persecution in the Middle East. “There is no legitimate reason to favor Christians over all others who are persecuted for their beliefs,” the Union’s legal director, David Cole, explained in a posting in January on the ACLU Web site.

We are not privy to all the considerations that are going into the administration’s decisions in these refugee cases. The New York Sun, though, subscribes to the idea of human capital — that given the right legal combination of liberty and law, all persons are net assets. We’re happy to credit the religious sages with this insight. It is trumped only by the exigencies of our national security, an obligation also born of a respect for life.

This is why we favor Congress and the Courts granting to the president — this or any president — a certain amount of discretion within the law to exercise his judgment. We just wonder whether Mr. Trump would be less loath to grant refuge to the Chaldeans were the riders of the 9th United States Appeals Circuit and the mandarins of the ACLU not on his back for trying to address the particular dangers to the Middle East Christians in the first place.