DL Open Thread: Tuesday, April 15, 2025

Trump To Supreme Court:  “Fuck You”:

It defies a Supreme Court ruling, flouts a lower court ruling, and undermines the basic principle that the government must provide due process before depriving someone of their freedom. Yet the man wrongly deported to a Salvadoran prison will remain there indefinitely, President Donald Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said during a Monday Oval Office meeting.

The pair of strongmen told reporters they would not seek the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen deported from the U.S. last month during a hastily executed operation that also removed more than 100 Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act.

Bukele and senior Trump officials indicated they felt no obligation to comply with court orders. Bukele suggested at one point he had received no U.S. request to release Abrego Garcia, saying that doing so would be to “smuggle” him into the country. Trump advisor Stephen Miller argued the courts had no authority to compel the government to act in matters of foreign relations.

In practical terms, that administration’s arguments asserted that the White House has the power to remove people to prisons in foreign countries, and then claim a mixture of powerlessness before foreign sovereignty and absolute authority over foreign affairs in refusing to secure those people’s release and return to the United States. Its position directly defies a court order and nudges us closer still to a constitutional crisis. The reality is that the Supreme Court has already sided with Abrego Garcia, upholding a lower court ruling that requires the administration to “facilitate” his “release from custody in El Salvador” and to ensure his case proceeds as if he had not been wrongly deported. A lower court judge continues to demand updates on efforts to comply.

Every day, Trump and his DOGE/ICE thugs are illegally ‘disappearing’ people.  Mohsen Mahdawi.  Mahmoud Khalil.  All those phony ‘gang’ members:

Nathali Sánchez last heard from her husband on March 14, when he called from a Texas detention center to say he was being deported back to Venezuela. Later that night, he texted her through a government messaging app for detainees.

“I love you,” he wrote, “soon we will be together forever.”

Her husband, Arturo Suárez Trejo, 33, a musician, had been in American custody for a month, calling every few days to assure his family that he was OK, his relatives said. Now, the couple believed they would reunite and he would finally meet his daughter, Nahiara, who had been born during his brief stint as a migrant in the United States.

But less than a day later, Mr. Suárez was shackled, loaded onto a plane and sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, according to an internal government list of detainees obtained by The New York Times. Around the time Mr. Suárez was texting his wife, the Trump administration was quietly invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a sweeping wartime power that allows the government to swiftly deport citizens of an invading nation.

Mr. Suárez and 237 others, the Trump administration argued after the order became public, were all members of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua, which was “aligned with” the Venezuelan government and was “perpetrating” an invasion of the United States.

Yet most of the men do not have criminal records in the United States or elsewhere in the region, beyond immigration offenses, a New York Times investigation has found. And very few of them appear to have any clear, documented links to the Venezuelan gang.

As they were being expelled, the detainees repeatedly begged officials to explain why they were being deported, and where they were being taken, one of their lawyers told the courts. At no point, the lawyer said, did officers indicate that the men were being sent to El Salvador or that they were removed under the Alien Enemies Act.

The Alien Enemies Act gives the U.S. government broad powers to detain people during times of war, but Supreme Court rulings make clear that detainees have a right to challenge the government, and are entitled to a hearing, before their removal.

Last month, an appeals court judge criticized the lack of due process under the Trump administration. “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemy Act,” said Judge Patricia Millett.

Trump now wants to send US citizens who disagree with him to El Salvador.  Uh, the fact that it’s ‘likely illegal’ hardly matters when Trump has now officially flipped off the courts.

Harvard Fights Back.  Good.  They probably have the legal firepower and the endowment to do it:

The demands, which came in a letter from officials at the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration, violate Harvard’s First Amendment rights, exceed the statutory limits of the government’s authority under federal civil rights law and threaten the private institution’s values, the university’s president, Alan Garber, wrote Monday in a letter to the campus community. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” he wrote.

Harrison Fields, a spokesperson for the White House, said universities are not entitled to federal funding. “President Trump is working to Make Higher Education Great Again by ending unchecked anti-Semitism and ensuring federal taxpayer dollars do not fund Harvard’s support of dangerous racial discrimination or racially motivated violence. Harvard or any institution that wishes to violate Title VI is, by law, not eligible for federal funding.”

Go To The White House, Have Your Trophy Broken.  Sad:

 

You guys are smart.  Don’t think I need to say anything about metaphors here.

What do you want to talk about?