The Trump administration said Monday, in defiance of a 9-0 Supreme Court order, that it is not required to return a U.S. resident it illegally sent to a Salvadoran concentration camp last month.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, backed up Trump at a White House meeting Tuesday afternoon, when he declared that he had no intention of sending home Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a 15-year resident of Maryland employed as a union sheet metal worker, who is married and has three children. His wife and children are all U.S. citizens.
Andrew Weisman, a former Department of Justice prosecutor, who left the DOJ during the first Trump administration, concluded in an MSNBC interview Tuesday that “the U.S. is now in a full-fledged constitutional crisis, with the president refusing to follow a direct ruling by the Supreme Court.” Trump told Bukele, with TV cameras rolling, that he wants to add U.S. citizens to the list of people he will ship off to prison in El Salvador.
He even told the Salvadoran president, who was with him in the White House, that he had to build additional prison camps in his country to accommodate “home-growns” from the United States, referring to U.S citizens he claimed were criminals.
Trump said he had instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to explore what laws could be used in order for him to carry out this additional unconstitutional threat of shipping citizens out of the country.
Sherilyn Ifill, a law professor at Howard University appearing on MSNBC, said she had no confidence that Bondi would try to resist Trump’s instructions.
Ifill noted that Trump considers the two million people incarcerated in U.S. federal prisons to be under his jurisdiction and that he can essentially do anything he wants with them, regardless of citizenship status.
“This is an incredible danger,” said Ifill, who was a long-time legal adviser to the NAACP. It means that we all have to be prepared to resist now even if we are unhappy about having to defend the rights of prisoners convicted of crimes. They are still citizens and entitled to the rights of citizens. If Trump gets away with this, every single one of us can be targeted next.”
Trump’s notorious anti-immigrant aide, Stephen Miller, told the press yesterday that the U.S. administration could not order El Salvador to return Garcia. “We would be violating Salvadoran sovereignty,” he claimed.
Throughout the history of the previous century and even earlier, the U.S. has routinely violated the sovereignty of Latin American nations up to the point of assassinating leaders and overthrowing governments.
In addition to making the absurd claim that the administration was protecting the sovereignty of another country, Miller lied about the actual Supreme Court ruling. He asserted that the 9-0 ruling was in the administration’s favor when the opposite was actually the case.
Miller claimed the decision allows Trump to decline bringing back Garcia because by instructing the administration to “facilitate” his return, the Court was not insisting he “execute the return.”
In any case, Miller said, the courts have no authority in the area of foreign policy. No reputable legal scholar has backed this interpretation of the Supreme Court ruling, and Trump’s refusal to carry it out has plunged the country into a constitutional crisis that goes far beyond a simple disagreement about what is or is not foreign policy.
The President of the United States is blatantly circumventing a Supreme Court ruling.
Garcia was torn from his home, his family and his job, where he was an apprentice sheet metal worker with the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers (SMART) union, which is demanding his return.
Rev. Sandra Castillo, who leads the Immigration Council of the Episcopal Church Diocese of Chicago, told People’s World that “if Trump is allowed to round up immigrants without due process, it would greenlight a system whereby people can be taken right off the streets or out of their homes, shipped overseas to a prison, and be forced to stay there perhaps for the rest of their lives with no recourse whatsoever.”
Castillo has been working with immigrants sent to Chicago for more than a year now by Republican governors in the South, particularly Texas.
According to many press outlets, the Trump administration has paid Bukele, “the world’s coolest dictator,” as he describes himself, some $7 million to keep more than 200 U.S. residents in prison at his notorious hard labor camp, where human rights advocates say torture is regularly carried out.
Garcia himself and most of the other U.S. residents imprisoned there have never been charged with a crime in the U.S., much less convicted.
In 2019, an unnamed person allegedly claimed Garcia was a member of the MS-13 gang’s New York chapter. After it was proved he had never even lived in New York, no charges of any type were ever filed against him. That didn’t stop Trump and his ICE squadrons from sweeping Garcia up with the rest of its targets.
Trump has claimed that much of what he has done is allowed under the Alien Enemies Act, a 19th century law. He has used it to excuse his rounding up of U.S. residents and sending them off to jail a thousand miles away in the U.S. or even overseas.
Rev. Castillo, in a recent sermon at St. Margaret of Scotland Episcopal Church on Chicago’s South Side, said: “It is technically incorrect to say that he is deporting people. Deportation is supposed to happen only after legal due process has been carried out. What Trump is doing is illegal grabbing of U.S. residents and ‘disappearing’ them in the style of fascists who have come before him.”
And now the president of the United States has, with his open defiance of the Supreme Court of the United States, finally plunged the country into the long-feared constitutional crisis most in the nation had hoped would not come to pass.
Related stories:
> The constitutional crisis is already here – what are we going to do about it?
> SMART union demands return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, worker illegally deported by Trump
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