The fight over President Donald Trump’s plan to use unprecedented authority to deport migrants heated up on Sunday, with Trump once again criticising the judiciary and a prominent Democrat warning the US was “closer and closer” to a constitutional catastrophe.
The latest developments follow the Supreme Court’s stunning intervention in the early hours of Saturday to temporarily halt Trump’s use of an obscure provision to deport Venezuelan migrants without due process.
Trump slammed the Supreme Court on his Truth Social platform on Sunday, without particularly mentioning it.
Trump lashed out Sunday on his Truth Social platform, not specifically naming the high court but criticising the “weak and ineffective judges and law enforcement officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our nation to continue, an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”
Samuel Alito, one of two conservative Supreme Court justices who voted against the suspension, called the majority’s emergency judgement “legally questionable”.
“Literally in the middle of the night, the court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief… without hearing from the opposing party,” Alito wrote in his dissent.
The court’s injunction at least temporarily delayed what rights groups had said were imminent deportations of Venezuelan migrants detained in Texas and accused of gang membership.
More broadly, the judgement temporarily prohibits the government from continuing to remove migrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last invoked to pick up Japanese-American citizens during WWII.
The Trump administration has clashed with federal judges, rights groups, and Democrats who claim he has violated or neglected constitutionally protected rights by hurrying to deport migrants, sometimes without a hearing.
“We’re getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis,” Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar told CNN.
“Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”
The Republican president has argued that he is defending American residents from an influx of unauthorised migrants, including murderers, terrorists, and rapists, while carrying out the will of the voters who reelected him to the White House.
Last month, the Trump administration sent hundreds of migrants, mostly Venezuelans, to El Salvador’s maximum-security CECOT jail, claiming they were members of dangerous gangs.
In the most known case, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison without charge.
The administration admitted that Abrego Garcia was listed in the deportee list owing to an “administrative error”, and a judge ruled that the government must “facilitate” his return.
Trump has subsequently doubled down on his claim that Abrego Garcia is a gang member, even publishing an apparently doctored photo of a gang emblem tattooed on his knuckles on social media on Friday.
CECOT detainees are crowded inside windowless cells, sleep on metal beds with no mattresses, and are not allowed to see visitors.
On Thursday, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to visit with Abrego Garcia, who expressed confusion over his imprisonment and a sense of threat in prison.
On Sunday, Van Hollen pressed the Trump administration to produce evidence that it is following US laws in its deportation campaign.
“I’m okay with whatever the rule of law dictates,” he told CNN, “but right now we have a lawless president… a lawless president who is ignoring the order of the Supreme Court of the United States to facilitate (Abrego Garcia’s) return.”
“They need to put up or shut up in the courts of the United States.”
