Trump’s Showdown With the Courts
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What is the constitutional crisis involving President Trump and the judiciary?
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams. This is The Daily. Yesterday, the showdown between President Trump and the courts reached a new milestone when Trump called for a federal judge to be impeached. And in response, the chief justice of the Supreme Court publicly scolded the president for attacking a member of the bench. Today, I spoke to my colleague Luke Broadwater about the deportation case at the center of the showdown and whether the constitutional crisis that many have feared is now actually here. It's Wednesday, March 19th. Luke, hi. Thank you so much for being here.
Hi. Thanks for having me.
So, Luke, every day since Trump came into office, it has really felt like the new administration has done something to make people who know about the law and the Constitution really nervous that we are headed towards some kind of a crisis, that there's going to be some kind of a showdown between the president and the courts, unlike anything we've ever seen before. But so far, largely, all of those fears, all of that conjecture has been pretty theoretical, except in the last few days. In the last few days, it feels like something has changed and maybe the crisis has actually arrived.
You're right. There's been a lot of concern since the start of the Trump administration about what would happen when or if the president began to disregard judicial rulings. And I would say this weekend was the starkest example to date of the president pushing the boundaries against the federal judiciary. And we saw the executive branch battling it out in court with the judiciary. And it's really reached a fever pitch here in Washington. And it all concerns the deportation of about 200 migrants from Venezuela to El Salvador.
OK, so I want to walk through how we got to this point. So tell us the basics of this deportation case that you just mentioned that have led us to this moment.
Well, for a long time, the Trump administration has wanted to deport people from the country faster and more aggressively than what was happening under the Biden administration. And the Trump administration has succeeded in doing that to a large extent. But it's not been fast enough for what President Trump and his top allies want to see. So they have been... Sort of combing through old laws, old statutes to try to figure out how they can get more people out of the country as quickly as possible without so many judges and reviews and hearings standing in their way. And so. On Friday, the president takes an extraordinary step. He signs an executive order in which he invokes wartime powers from the 1700s called the Alien Enemies Act, which is really supposed to apply to a time of war. Mm-hmm. He claims the United States is being invaded and the order targets a criminal gang from Venezuela.
And using this authority, he argues he is able to bypass the normal system of judicial review and deport hundreds of migrants to holding cells in El Salvador.
So it sounds like there are actually two things that are sort of unusual just right off the bat. One is that the United States is deporting these people to a country that they are not from. And the second thing that's unusual is that he's relying on this law that is not typically or maybe ever used for deportations.
That's absolutely right. What's happened here is the United States has struck a deal with the government of El Salvador to ship migrants that the United States doesn't want in the country to El Salvador to jail cells there. That is an extraordinary step. And then on top of that, it isn't announced. the border is kept under wraps. And so the Trump administration can begin setting the wheels in motion to start these deportations without people really knowing about it. Now, this is where things get interesting. The ACLU caught wind that the administration was planning to do this executive order. And they file a preemptive lawsuit to try to block it. They are able to file it on behalf of five migrants who would be subject to deportation. And that sets in motion what's essentially a weekend-long sprint between the administration and the ACLU, with both sides trying to race to either deport these people or block the deportations.
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