It Is Happening Every Day, Every Where
The case, involving a 20-year-old Venezuelan, comes on the heels of another legal battle over the fate of a different man wrongfully sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration.
The president claimed that countries were sending their prisoners to the United States and that he needed to bypass the constitutional demands of due process to expel them quickly.
President Trump says he is powerless to retrieve a man who was deported because of an administrative error. But he has done so before.
Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.
President Trump’s aides abruptly said the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, had been lawfully sent to a prison in El Salvador, contradicting what officials themselves have said in court filings.
Mr. Trump has found in President Nayib Bukele a willing partner in a plan to step up the removal of migrants from the United States with little or no due process.
The Justice Department’s latest legal filing asserted that courts cannot direct President Trump’s foreign policy by forcing the return of a man unlawfully sent to a Salvadoran prison.
Clashes — both inside the courtroom and over the department’s refusal to comply with her demand for a road map to release Mr. Abrego Garcia — left open the possibility of a standoff in the future.
A trial judge had ordered the Trump administration to take steps to return the migrant, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, from a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Inside the Justice Department’s civil division, lawyers are squeezed between judges demanding answers and bosses’ instructions to protect the Trump agenda at all costs.