America has reached a very dangerous moment, as the Supreme Court’s indulgence of President Donald Trump’s belief in his own untrammeled authority collides with the justices’ expectation that he will abide by their decisions.

This evening, the Supreme Court upheld part of a lower-court decision ordering the Trump administration to seek to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom—as The Atlantic first reported—the administration has acknowledged it mistakenly dispatched to El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT. Abrego Garcia, who came to the United States illegally but was allowed to stay after a judge ruled that he was likely to be persecuted by gangs in his native El Salvador, would be the first person publicly known to be released from CECOT.

“The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the justices wrote in an unsigned order.

The fact that the order was issued without dissent was remarkable. The Roberts Court has indulged Trump at nearly every turn, first writing the anti-insurrection clause out of the Fourteenth Amendment and then foiling his federal prosecution by inventing a grant of presidential immunity with no basis in the text of the Constitution. Justice John Roberts and his colleagues have deployed a selective proceduralism to avoid directly confronting the Trump administration, one that contrasts with their alacrity in cases where they are seeking their preferred outcome. Yet the confrontation they sought to avoid has arrived nonetheless, and even the Trumpiest justices, such as Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, joined their colleagues in informing the Trump administration that what it had done was illegal and should be remedied.

Abrego Garcia has lived in the U.S. for more than a decade and has no criminal record. He is married to a U.S. citizen and has an American child, and the only evidence the administration has produced to link him to gangs is a single allegation from an anonymous informant in 2019. Due process exists because the state is supposed to prove its allegations against you before depriving you of life and liberty. The Constitution envisions law enforcement as flawed and subject to potential abuse, not as infallible.