Lee Gelernt
speaker
55 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Lee Gelernt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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He's simply saying you cannot use a wartime authority without any due process. And he's been 100% clear about it. The government knows that. And what he has said to the government point blank in court is, look, If anybody in the administration is going out there saying, I'm letting these people out on the street, they need to stop doing it.
He's, I think, really upset that people are mischaracterizing what he's doing.
You know, if the government is going to put people on the stand, it will be surprising to me, at least. I think the only thing that's predictable now about the Trump administration is they're going to take this all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court again. And how the court rules, I don't know.
But I don't see the government saying, sure, we'll bring the people back, we'll do the right thing, or sure, we'll take the stand and tell you the truth. I wish one of those two things would happen. But right now, based on what I've seen the last few months, I don't see the Trump administration doing it.
So I would say in answer to your question, the only thing that's predictable is they will keep fighting. They've already appealed to the circuit, and I suspect they'll go to the Supreme Court. That's unfortunate. Yeah.
Thanks, Rachel.
Yeah. So I think he was frustrated and he's been frustrated now for several weeks about the government's actions. So there's two sort of parallel things going on in this case. One is, can the administration use this wartime authority during peacetime and remove people potentially for the rest of their lives to this brutal Salvadoran prison?
without any due process whatsoever we say no so far the courts have said no we'll see that case is pending in the spring court now we'll see what the spring court says but at the same time the judge is also trying to figure out was his order violated we had an emergency saturday night hearing the administration started moving people under this authority before they even published the law
he said turn the planes around till we can figure things out or if they land in el salvador bring the people back the administration did not bring the people back and in a highly publicized video you saw those men being turned over to salvador in prison so the judge is very very concerned that the administration just sort of blatantly violated his order not to turn the planes around and what is he when he said is if you thought my water was wrong appeal it you did appeal it
But don't just ignore a federal court's order. He's trying to get to the bottom of what happened, who did it, who ordered them not to turn the planes around, and was it done deliberately.
Yeah, I mean, you're asking the exact right question. I don't know how the administration is going to play it. So far, they've not only failed to turn over the information, but they've invoked something called the state secrets privilege, which is invoked so rarely and only in the most serious matters, you know, matters with CIA kind of investigations and that kind of thing.
So I don't know what they're going to do. I think the judge is not going to let them off the hook. He is going to want to know who's responsible, what happened. And he today said there may need to be hearings. And he also said, you know, maybe you want to try and avoid contempt by bringing these individuals back. So we'll see how he plays it. But the one thing he's been clear about is
This is not about him. This is about a federal court's authority. And I think he is very, very concerned that the administration is just thumbing their nose at the judiciary and saying, well, there was this order, but so be it.
Yeah, absolutely. And I wish we could say it was only one person, but we know one person definitively now. But we have started to put in evidence showing that many people were likely mistakenly sent, that they were not gang members. They're using things like tattoos as what they think is definitive proof, but they're not giving anybody a hearing to contest that.
Experts have said tattoos are not a reliable indicator for this gang. I think when it's all said and done, we are going to find out that many, many, many people are sitting in a Salvadoran prison, potentially for the rest of their lives, and were never gang members. And the fact that they didn't get any due process means we may just have
send people there when they were going to hear from again and so i think this one person that we know now is definitively a mistake i think that's just the tip of the iceberg uh i don't know what the administration's going to do but this judge is going to get to the bottom of it one way or the other and we not only have to deal with the people who've already been sent but we really need to stop it going forward because the administration's saying we don't need to give them process and we will start removing
Thank you.
The Rachel Maddow Show · Independent Agency CEO: 'DOGE has broken into our building.' · 18 Mar 2025
podcast
Thanks for having me, Rachel.
No, no, no. Sorry. You got it all correct. And I think set it up nicely. And I would just start by saying that, you know, you and I have talked about a lot of big issues over the years. I think right now this is one of the biggest that we've ever discussed. And for two reasons. One is the use of this wartime authority.
is so unprecedented and so dangerous during peacetime that we all need to be concerned, because right now it's Venezuelans who are being tagged with it and sent off to a Salvadoran prison without any due process whatsoever. But if the courts allow this, it could be one group after another that's just... whisked away and put in Salvador in prison with no access to anybody.
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