Transcript
Tim Miller (0:00)
Hey guys, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark here with Andrew Egger, author of our Morning Shots newsletter. We got breaking news from the Supreme Court. They have held that the Trump administration violated the due process rights of Venezuelan migrants last month in its effort to expel them to El Salvador. SCOTUS had previously blocked the effort to send more migrants to El Salvador. So this is consistent with that. Shout out to our man Mark Joseph Stern, who's given us this reporting Breaking on Blue Sky. A couple other things before we get to Edgar here. The Supreme Court did not give a ruling on whether the Trump administration can remove migrants under the Alien Enemies act at all. It's just, they just ruled that the process in which they attempted to do it was against the law. And as I mentioned, they continue to block future deportations under this act. And there is some encouragement that they're consider that they have upheld this representing the migrants as an entire class. So I do know that some of the, that the migrants are the Venezuelans that have been disappeared to El Salvador are hopeful that like, together, you know, they can get a ruling on their, on their treatment and hopefully eventually brought back. So that is the quickest summary of, of what happened. Obviously, we'll have more of a legal analysis with our legal folks, George Conway, I think his show will be on later tonight and others. But Andrew, what's your top take on this?
Andrew Egger (1:21)
Yeah, I think that's, that's basically the gist of it is that, you know, this is a smallish procedural point in the grand scheme of things. You know, essentially they're, they're, they're kicking something back to a circuit court to re. To reconsider under, you know, under slightly different auspices. I'll read here from SCOTUS blog just to give people a sense of like, how, how fiddly and narrow this, this point is. The unsigned majority instructs the Fifth Circuit to address the normal preliminary injunction factors as to the group's underlying habeas claims that the AEA does not authorize their removal as to President Trump's March 14th proclamation. So you get all that? That's what, that's what just happened.
Tim Miller (2:00)
I fell asleep.
Andrew Egger (2:01)
Yeah, yeah. No, so it's a small thing like technically speaking, but it signifies a few things that are, at least in my opinion, pretty large. One of which is that certainly from the point of view of these people who the Trump administration wants to deport immediately, it's very significant because the circuit court had previously ruled they did not have a jurisdiction to sue the administration to prevent that from happening as a class, as you gestured to before the, the, the Supreme Court has now thrown that out. The Supreme Court has said no, there is this jurisdiction to treat these, these people as a class and the circuit must consider them on, on those grounds as it retries this. That's pretty significant. I mean, like, like, not, not each of these individual cases have to be kind of like brought under their own auspices or whatever. The other just kind of bigger, like 20,000 foot thing here is just that it's a, it's a pretty big punch back, It's a, it's a brush back pitch from the Supreme Court against the Trump administration. In addition to the one that we already saw over the due process stuff, the Trump administration had been gearing up to at least make a lot of noises as though it was going to defy the Supreme Court on, on some of these things. But, but so far what we've really seen from them is like this game of chicken where they say, gosh, we really hope the courts don't like, you know, get in our way and do all this bad stuff. And, and you know, we hope, we hope the courts don't embrace radical leftism because if they did that, we might have to suspend habeas corpus and we might have to defy the courts and all these sorts of things. But they haven't actually done that much. They did it a couple months ago with the original deportations to El Salvador. There was some of that. But they've kind of hit the brakes and it's kind of been like they're kind of like trying to threaten the courts in the hope of getting better rulings. But when they have not gotten favorable rulings, they have not followed through on those threats. And so it's good to see the court, even in this kind of small and procedural way, apparently still standing firm despite that kind of like nice rule of law you got there. Shame if anything happened to it kind of rhetoric from the administration.