Stephen Miller Egregiously Misrepresented a Supreme Court Order While Trump Nodded Along

On April 4, a federal district court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate and effectuate the return…to the United States” of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a man whom the Trump administration admits that it unlawfully deported to a Salvadoran prison because of an “administrative error.”

On April 10, the U.S. Supreme Court largely affirmed the district court’s position. In an unsigned order, issued with no noted dissents, the Supreme Court declared that the district court’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” The Supreme Court then further ordered the Trump administration to “be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

Yet the Trump administration is now proffering a bizarro world version of that order which turns the Supreme Court’s ruling on its head in an effort to give free rein to Trump.

Yesterday, seated next to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele during an Oval Office press conference, Trump was questioned by a reporter about whether he would ask Bukele “to help return the man your administration says was mistakenly deported, the man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador?” Trump, who appeared to have no idea about what was going on in the case, deferred to Stephen Miller, his deputy White House chief of staff.

“The Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously,” Miller told Trump.

The term misinformation has become somewhat overused in recent times. But it seems applicable here. Miller egregiously misrepresented what the Supreme Court actually said in its order. Was he lying? Did he fail to correctly read the Court’s order and is now publicly operating based on his erroneous understanding? Either way, it was a disgraceful performance.

And it’s probably only going to get uglier from here. At the heart of the Trump administration’s position is a naked assertion of unchecked power. Once the federal government has deported someone to the hellish prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration asserts, there is nothing that anyone—especially not a federal judge—can do about it. What is worse, by the administration’s own admission, it does not matter whether the deportee was lawfully removed in the first place or not. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor has accurately observed, “the Government’s argument…implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” The word for what Sotomayor is describing is despotism.

The Trump administration is fond of invoking the president’s “inherent”—meaning, unwritten—powers. But let’s not forget about what is actually written in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, which requires the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Can there be any doubt that Trump is in open violation of that constitutional requirement in this case?

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