We’ll leave the writing in this editorial to two voices that deserve to be magnified. First, the words of Chief Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, who rejected an appeal by the Trump Administration in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was mistakenly sent to an El Salvadoran prison:

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Next, are words from William Kenneth Sessions III, a senior judge of the U.S. District Court of Vermont, who said Rumeysa Ozturk should be sent to Vermont as she challenges her detention:

“Ms. Ozturk argues that her detention is in retaliation for her political speech, thus violating her rights under the First and Fifth Amendments. Her evidence supports her argument that the government’s motivation or purpose for her detention is to punish her for co-authoring an op-ed in a campus newspaper which criticized the Tufts University administration, and to chill the political speech of others. The government has so far offered no evidence to support an alternative, lawful motivation or purpose for Ms. Ozturk’s detention.”

We agree on both counts.