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- Justices Block Deportation of New Group of Migrants
Justices Block Deportation of New Group of Migrants
Trump defies courts and shifts focus
Matt Davis
April 20, 2025
‘Sup?
This morning’s front page focuses on The Supreme Court temporarily blocking the Trump administration early Saturday from deporting another group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.
More than 50 Venezuelans were scheduled to be flown to El Salvador from an immigration detention center in Anson, Texas, prompting the A.C.L.U. lawyers to mount challenges in three different courts within five hours on Friday.
“These men were close to spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had any due process,” Lee Gelernt, the lead A.C.L.U. attorney on the case, said on Saturday. “The case has a long way to go. But for now, we are relieved that the court has not allowed the Trump administration to hurry them away in secret.”
Since March the Trump administration has sent five flights carrying deportees to El Salvador under a deal with its president, Nayib Bukele, to hold detainees deemed by U.S. authorities to be part of criminal gangs in his country’s prison system, for a fee. You say prison. I say concentration camp. But you say pot-ay-toh, I say pot-art-oh. It’s the same thing we’re talking about.
I wonder if there’s a sign over the entrance reading…
🥔 “Work makes you free” 🥔?
*Incidentally, I am aware of the considerable discourse saying it’s dangerous to compare Trump to Hitler, or to call his administration Nazis. I respect it. Elon Musk is 100% a Nazi, though. I’m happy to say so. And I would encourage you to be.
Last month the Trump administration invoked a 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, as a way to deport immigrants he claims are members of a violent Venezuelan street gang. The Supreme Court has essentially called b.s. on that practice and said that even if the administration wants to continue using it, it must follow due process and give people a hearing.
Washington Judge James E. Boasberg has considered opening a contempt investigation into the Trump administration after it ignored his earlier order to stop deporting migrants under the act. I’ve “considered opening a contempt investigation” is not exactly fighting talk, is it? Although one senses judges all over the country are doing their best to ignore the evident reality that Mr. Trump doesn’t care what they say until the Supreme Court says it again. And even then, Clarence Thomas (whose friends definitely love Hitler) is still going to dissent. 🤦🏻♂️
Still, immigrants were asked Friday to sign papers in English even though they only speak Spanish, consenting to their removal under the act. Here’s a lovely little horror detail:
When he refused to sign, immigration officers told him the waiver was “coming from the president,” according to court papers, “and that he will be deported even if he did not sign it.”
Immigration agents are also relying on the flimsiest evidence to “prove” immigrants are members of the gang.
When the agents initially questioned him, court papers say, they told him that a photograph on Facebook showing him in the presence of another person holding a gun proved he was a member of [the gang].
In fact that was a water pistol, the man’s lawyers have said. Not that it matters. Can you imagine being able to put someone in detention because you’d looked at a picture on social media, without putting them before a jury? It’s dystopia. It sounds like something out of, I don’t know. Where would you say you’ve heard of stories like that happening before? 🤔
Good old Sweden, eh?
These agents should be ashamed to live in a free society and we should investigate and jail them. I would like to deport them to a “prison” in El Salvador without due process, if I could.
Chief White House correspondent Peter Baker writes an analysis of the situation in a separate piece on the front page:
According to liberal and conservative judges all the way up to the Supreme Court, President Trump’s administration broke the rules by deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and must try to fix the mistake. But Mr. Trump and his team are trying to rewrite the narrative so that it is a dispute about illegal immigration rather than the rule of law.
By defying the courts over the issue, Mr. Trump wins political support from racists, the theory goes. But Mr. Baker makes the case for this “crystalizing a debate about whether Mr. Trump is a law-abiding American.”
I think that could be a reach, personally, and it’s not bolstered by quoting the president of a nonprofit who cites a “visceral response” that I’ve only seen, so far, from my left-leaning friends and of course, wife:
“Donald Trump is desperately trying to change the conversation on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s abduction and disappearance because he’s losing in the courts and in the court of public opinion,” said Kica Matos, president of the National Immigration Law Center. “The vast majority of Americans value the rule of law and the separation of powers, and the public is viscerally responding to these growing attacks on our democracy.”
Like, yeah. Do we define a visceral response by protest numbers? Because if we do, I’m afraid the photographs of protests yesterday were all taken far too close-in, and as a reporter who used to cover plenty of protests I can tell you, that’s a storytelling trick you use to elevate the drama of the situation when there simply aren’t enough pissed-off people in the streets.
Good to see a Nazi comparison in Washington, though, eh? Although why 1938? 1939? 1932? Are we perhaps at the point where it’s reasonable only to argue which year in the 1930s the Trump administration is closest to echoing, and how long it’ll be before they stage a Reichstag fire? I don’t think so, personally. I think there’ll be midterms in 2026 and a disastrous election for the Nazi party in 2028. But perhaps I’m naive.
The thing is, if you supported Trump before, you still support him. Mr. Baker also quotes a former Obama aide, who, likewise, didn’t support Mr. Trump before and still doesn’t:
“Whatever the merits of this individual case, it’s becoming clearer to the American public that he could be any of us,” said Cecilia Muñoz, a former domestic policy adviser to President Barack Obama. “The president is going way too far, further than what he told the public he would do during the campaign and way farther than what the country is comfortable with.”
Who is this “country” that is supposedly so uncomfortable? I feel like it could be imagined. One stand-out hero (and the bar is low on heroism in the Democratic party, it seems), is Mr. Abrego Garcia’s senator from Maryland, Chris Van Hollen, who flew to El Salvador to meet him.
“If you want to make claims about Mr. Abrego Garcia and MS-13,” the gang, “you should present them in the court, not over social media, not at press conferences, where you just rattle stuff off,” Mr. Van Hollen said after landing at Washington Dulles International Airport on Friday.
Fair. That one lands. Wouldn’t it be great to see a few more Senator Van Hollens? Mr. Trump even took to Truth Social to have a crack at him in the world’s best ever example of “pot and kettle.”
What a f___ing psycho.
The El Salvadorian president had his people put margaritas in front of Senator Van Hollen and Mr. Garcia to attempt to spin the narrative. “It’s the lengths that President Bukele will go to deceive people about what’s going on,” Mr. Van Hollen said. Another pointed and successful rebuke.
Nonetheless, some Democrats are nervous that they are playing into Mr. Trump’s hands by focusing on the case, allowing the president to draw attention away from the market-plunging consequences of his global trade war and other issues that might be more meaningful to many Americans.
Gavin “You think Donald Trump is a psycho?” Newsom of California has called the case the “distraction of the day”, saying that the Democrats look like they are defending a street criminal who is “out of sight, out of mind” in El Salvador. I find that offensive, personally, on a number of levels, just as I find Gavin Newsom offensive. He seems to think he has a shot at persuading the majority of Americans he hasn’t spent the last several years as the Democratic Governor of California. But I believe it’s possible to hold two issues in mind and hold the Trump administration accountable for them both at the same time. I do not believe that the existence of concentration camps being “out of sight, out of mind” should be a reason not to fight hard against them. The fact that many Germans went on with their daily lives unaware of the horrors of Auschwitz is particularly pertinent here, for me. I’m also mindful of the Trump administration’s repeated efforts to invoke “antisemitism” as its reasons for cracking down on universities as problematic in that context.
It’s a lot to hold in your head, isn’t it, reading the newspaper these days? There are complex ideas playing out. It’s exhausting to keep track of them all, and to come up with a coherent individual position. I understand why you’d prefer it if I read the newspaper so that you don’t have to. But remember: That’s the game totalitarians play. They want to exhaust you into submission. Fight it.
Speaking of complexity, as the Times points out, “Defending the rule of law can be politically complicated because it often involves individuals with less-than-perfect histories who, under the American system, are still afforded due process.”
It’s true. Although Mr. Abrego Garcia worked in construction and lived with his wife, a U.S. citizen, and their three children with special needs. He sounds like a person struggling manfully with a challenging situation and the fact that he wore a Chicago Bulls baseball cap in a photograph hardly persuades me he’s a violent criminal. Still, there’s some more difficulty in the case. It’s not easy to swallow, but here it is.
Moreover, his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, filed a request for a protective order against him in 2021, citing violence against her. In a statement this week, she said she did so “in case things escalated” but “things did not escalate” and added that she did not follow through with the process, instead working out their difficulties “privately as a family, including by going to counseling.” She has been publicly campaigning for his release.
That’s tough. I’m not inclined to defend wife-beaters and it sounds like he is one. If I’m going to rail against Nazis, then I can’t let a wife-beater off the hook. I bet the Nazi/Wife-beater Venn diagram overlaps, too. Because life is complicated. Meanwhile here’s another would-be Nazi:
“The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal gang member has completely fallen apart,” Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, said in a statement. “We hear far too much about the gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
But that sure feels like propaganda to me. One of Ronald Reagan’s Federal Judges has been direct about it.
In his opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel, Judge Wilkinson chastised the Trump administration for asserting that it can “stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons” without due process. “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” he wrote.
Mr. Trump is undeterred. He’ll continue to dig in on the case and take his argument to the public. Still, “I’m sure it’s a winner politically,” Jack L. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under Mr. Bush, said of the White House argument. But “the point is the government is bound by the rule of law,” he said. “And it’s just vitally important that in insisting that others — including immigrants — follow the rule of law and court decisions that the government do the same.”
Thanks for letting me read the newspaper so that you don’t have to.
Say, is there a story on the front page that might cheer me up a bit?
Sure. Read a story by a former Mormon who can’t scratch the old religion itch, any other way. And Happy Easter.
Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.
Standard disclaimer: I read the top story in the New York Times every morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. I’m also doing a five-minute video version of this, each weekday morning at around 9 a.m. (depending on how long it takes me to read the newspaper). If you’d like to follow me on LinkedIn (you can always watch the recording later). If you subscribe to my Youtube channel it’ll also send you a notification when I’m “going live.”