Donald Trump's latest rant indicates that his administration will remain on a collision course with the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the rule of law.
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“I’m doing what I was elected to do, remove criminals from our Country, but the Courts don’t seem to want me to do that,” the president wrote. “My team is fantastic, doing an incredible job, however, they are being stymied at every turn by even the US Supreme Court, which I have such great respect for, but which seemingly doesn’t want me to send violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela, or any other Country, for that matter — People that came here illegally!”
There is quite a bit to unpack here.
First of all, the reason he is being “stymied at every turn” is that the administration consistently ignores the rule of law and the Constitution, which forces the courts on every level to step in.
His deportation policy is just the most prominent example of that lawlessness. This is in large part owed to the incompetence and combativeness of his “fantastic” team, which made it quite clear that the Trump administration has no interest in complying with some court orders. That, in turn, forced the Supreme Court to intervene.
Also, the current crisis is not the result of sending “violent criminals and terrorists back to Venezuela,” which would be no problem if their cases had been adjudicated. Instead, it’s about shipping Venezuelans (and a few others), most of whom have not been convicted of anything, off to a third country where they are put in a prison camp with no legal recourse to challenge that decision and at the expense of US taxpayers.
That is called human trafficking.
Therefore, it is hardly surprising that the Supreme Court felt the need to act to ensure that anybody residing in the United States is afforded the right to due process, which the Constitution grants them.
That is at odds with what Trump wants.
The president not only believes that undocumented immigrants are not deserving of due process, but also that it would be impractical to grant them that right.
“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” Trump stated. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do.”
However, the law does not care whether something is inconvenient.
Finally, the Supreme Court is not halting all deportations, just those of the small number of people being trafficked to El Salvador.
More than anything, Trump’s rant indicates that he will continue to defy a lower court’s order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man the administration admitted to illegally sending to El Salvador.
In other words, we are inching closer to a full-blown constitutional crisis that could come to a head at any moment now.
