Donald Trump just sent the Supreme Court an unambiguous message: You made your ruling. Now enforce it, because I’m not going to. That constitutional crisis we’ve expected, yet feared? It’s here.
On Monday, both Trump officials and the president of El Salvador said they could not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported and sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
“Of course, I’m not going to do it,” El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said when he was asked whether he would return Garcia. At his side, Trump sat smirking. Attorney General Pam Bondi joined in the cruel pantomime: “That’s up for El Salvador if they want to return him.”
And just like that, the White House openly defied a unanimous ruling by the nation’s highest court.
Last week, by a vote of 9-0, the court instructed the government to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia. But the justices left Trump just enough wiggle room to scoff at making effort at all, despite multiple rulings from federal courts, including a district court judge who called Abrego Garcia’s arrest “wholly lawless.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland wrote:
Defendants seized Abrego Garcia without any lawful authority; held him in three separate domestic detention centers without legal basis; failed to present him to any immigration judge or officer; and forcibly transported him to El Salvador in direct contravention of the INA. Once there, U.S. officials secured his detention in a facility that, by design, deprives its detainees of adequate food, water, and shelter, fosters routine violence; and places him with his persecutors.
On Sunday, the Trump administration claimed that the federal courts lacked any jurisdiction in the case. The White House made this argument even though it was already rejected unanimously last week by a federal appeals court. “The United States Government has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process,” the judges from the 4th Circuit wrote. “The Government’s contention otherwise, and its argument that the federal courts are powerless to intervene are unconscionable.”
But the “unconscionable” position is now the official position of the administration, and Trump is now daring the nation’s highest court to do something about it.
