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A legal theme of President Donald Trump’s second term is judges not being able to trust his administration’s statements in court. This theme has been especially pronounced in immigration-related cases, where the government has taken some of its most aggressive and lawbreaking stances.

It’s against this backdrop that one of Trump’s own judicial appointees said Thursday that an official explanation offered in court “crumbled like a house of cards.”......

His 43-page opinion contains haunting details, including excerpts of declarations from some of the children who warned of dangerous fates that would await them. One of them said “the conditions she would return to in Guatemala would cause her to kill herself,” Kelly wrote.

The judge’s stern accounting wasn’t limited to the “house of cards” remark. He wrote elsewhere that Trump officials “misstate the legal standard” and that their conduct in deeming children eligible for sending to Guatemala suggested “that they are not applying their criteria accurately, consistently, or in ways that reflect good faith.” He further criticized the “rushed, seemingly error-laden operation to send unaccompanied alien children back to their home countries,” calling it one of the things that federal law seeks to prevent.

The judge wrote that officials’ conduct doesn’t “inspire confidence that they themselves are convinced that they have the authority to proceed as they would like.” If they were convinced of their authority, the judge wondered, then “why exercise it in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend with nothing but a late-night (or early-morning) notice to the children’s caretakers and advocates?”

Why, indeed.

At a time when the administration is bending or breaking the law across various facets of American life, Kelly’s ruling is a reminder that at least some judges have served as a bulwark, and that they stand ready to apply the law to lawless government actions when they’re challenged in court.