When a federal appeals court in Virginia pressed the White House in an order this week to take a more active approach in seeking the release of a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month, it caused a stir that was felt well beyond traditional legal circles.

The attention was due in part to the order’s blistering language in accusing the Trump administration of failing to give the deported man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, any semblance of due process and to its elegiac tone about the state of American democracy.

But an uproar also ensued because of who wrote the opinion: Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative Reagan appointee who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Judge Wilkinson, 80, has emerged in recent weeks as a scathing critic of the White House’s handling of the case of Mr. Abrego Garcia, who several Trump officials have acknowledged was deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order expressly barring him from being sent there.

Judge Wilkinson has voiced his outrage at the White House’s mistake, writing in an opinion two weeks ago, “There is no question that the government screwed up here.”

He has shown even less patience for the administration’s refusal to do much to get Mr. Abrego Garcia back from a notoriously dangerous Salvadoran prison.

“This should be shocking not only to judges,” he wrote on Thursday, “but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Here is a quick look at Judge Wilkinson’s career on the bench.

An Unusual Path

The son of a patrician Virginia banker, Judge Wilkinson studied law at the University of Virginia after serving two years in the Army at the height of the Vietnam War. While he was stationed stateside and never saw combat, he has said in interviews that he was deeply involved in the debates at the time about the war and the civil rights movement.

After one year of law school, he took a break to run for Congress in 1970 as a Republican and finished his legal education after losing the race. Over the next decade or so, he served as a clerk for a family friend, Justice Lewis F. Powell, worked as a law professor, oversaw the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot and served in top positions in the Justice Department.

President Ronald Reagan nominated him to the Fourth Circuit in 1983. He has spent more than 40 years on the appeals court and was briefly considered by President George W. Bush as a candidate to sit on the Supreme Court.

Strong Conservative Bona Fides

Judge Wilkinson has a long track record of conservative rulings under his belt, having criticized rulings establishing abortion rights while writing approvingly of a broad conception of presidential power.

In 2002, in a case arising from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he wrote that “the authority to capture those who take up arms against America belongs to the commander in chief.”

He has also been critical of judicial overreach, criticizing both Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion, and District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 decision that established an individual right to own guns protected by the Second Amendment.

“The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins,” he wrote in The Virginia Law Review in 2009. Among their flaws, he argued, were “a failure to respect legislative judgments,” “a rejection of the principles of federalism” and “a willingness to embark on a complex endeavor that will require fine-tuning over many years of litigation.”

The Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022 and has been expanding the scope of Second Amendment rights since the Heller decision.

In 2014, Judge Wilkinson wrote a decision striking down a North Carolina law that had required doctors to perform ultrasounds, display the resulting sonograms and describe the fetuses to women seeking abortions.

“The state cannot commandeer the doctor-patient relationship to compel a physician to express its preference to the patient,” he wrote.

Last year, Judge Wilkinson wrote the majority opinion in a ruling upholding a Maryland law banning semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15.

“We decline to wield the Constitution to declare that military-style armaments, which have become primary instruments of mass killing and terrorist attacks in the United States, are beyond the reach of our nation’s democratic processes,” Judge Wilkinson wrote.

Clinging to Hope

In a wistful passage of his opinion in the Abrego Garcia case, Judge Wilkinson all but begged the Trump administration to avoid an “incipient crisis” and soften its increasingly belligerent stance toward the courts.

“We yet cling to the hope,” he wrote, “that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the executive branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos.”

That sentiment was in keeping with the way he has bemoaned partisanship on the bench as well.

When the full Fourth Circuit ruled in 2020 that a challenge to President Trump’s business practices could move forward, the court split along partisan lines. All nine judges in the majority were originally nominated by Democratic presidents; all six judges in dissent were nominated by Republicans.

The decision overturned a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of Republican appointees. And in dissent, Judge Wilkinson lamented the majority’s ruling, writing that it had invited “the judiciary to assemble along partisan lines in suits that seek to enlist judges as partisan warriors in contradiction to the rule of law that is and should be our first devotion.”

Judge Wilkinson is a prominent “feeder judge,” sending many of his law clerks to work for Supreme Court justices across the ideological spectrum, which is rare. (His daughter, Porter Wilkinson, once clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.)

“I’ve tried in my own hiring on the circuit court level not to put an ideological litmus test on anyone I’ve hired,” Judge Wilkinson said in a 2010 interview. “Law is a craft and profession that in many ways transcends philosophy.”

One of his former clerks, Danielle R. Sassoon, resigned as the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan in February after she refused to carry out the Trump administration’s command to drop the corruption prosecution of New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams.

In an interview, Judge Wilkinson said Ms. Sassoon had been an exemplary clerk.

“While I do not know the particulars in this case,” he said, “what I do know is that Danielle possesses great integrity and courage, which has always made me proud.”