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A three-judge panel for the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the Trump administration’s request to overturn a lower-court order requiring it to return a wrongfully deported Salvadorian immigrant to the U.S.

“The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the court ruled. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene, are unconscionable.”

President Donald Trump last month invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), an 18th century wartime law, to deport the man, Kilmer Abrego Garcia, and hundreds of other people to a hard labor prison in El Salvador....

“There is no question that the government screwed up here,” Circuit Judge Harvie Wilkinson, who was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan, wrote. “The withholding of removal order was country specific; it banned the government from removing Abrego Garcia to El Salvador and El Salvador only.”

Wilkinson said granting the Trump administration’s request would create a loophole through which it could “whisk individuals to foreign prisons in violation of court orders and then contend, invoking its Article II powers, that it is no longer their custodian, and there is nothing that can be done.”