Presented by BP

Good morning everyone. This is Playbook Daily Briefing. I'm Deputy Editor Zach Stanton. It's Friday, April 18th, and to those of you who observe, I hope you have a meaningful Good Friday.

Driving the day today is the ongoing saga of Kilmar Obrego-Garcia, the man who was wrongly deported from Maryland and sent

to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. Last night, two major pieces of news broke on that story.

The first has to do with the man himself. Around 9 p.m., Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen announced

that he was able to meet with Arago Garcia while in El Salvador. Precious Little is known

at this hour about the particulars of their meeting.

Van Hollen posted a photo of the two men, and Salvador and President Naib Buckele posted several

more accompanied by a trollish tone in his message.

Van Hollen's office promises to reveal further details later today.

The second piece of news is about the broader legal fight.

Yesterday in an opinion for the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson,

an appointee of Ronald Reagan, lambasted the administration for, quote,

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, unquote. And that gets at the heart of something that has driven

not just the day but the whole week. For the foes of Donald Trump and Trumpism, this week has been

a wake-up call, as the president showed his determination to steamroll his way through the norms

undergirding American democracy.

It's true when it comes to the rule of the Constitution in the judicial system,

as embodied by the Ibrego-Garcia case,

but it's not just the Abrago-Garcia case that has injected the resistance with a new sense of urgency.

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