The political battle over former President Donald Trump’s push to expand his powers on immigration intensified Sunday, with Trump once again targeting the judiciary and a leading Democrat warning the nation is edging toward a constitutional crisis.
The flare-up followed a dramatic early-morning ruling by the Supreme Court on Saturday, which temporarily blocked Trump’s attempt to use a rarely invoked law to deport Venezuelan migrants without due process.
Taking to his Truth Social platform Sunday, Trump didn’t name the court directly but railed against “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges and Law Enforcement Officials who are allowing this sinister attack on our Nation to continue – an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”
Justice Samuel Alito, one of two conservative justices who voted against the ruling, called the emergency action by the court’s majority “legally questionable.”
“Literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief ... without hearing from the opposing party,” Alito wrote in his dissent.
The court’s order at least temporarily halted what rights groups said were imminent deportations of Venezuelan migrants being held in Texas, accused by authorities of being gang members.
More broadly, the decision pauses the administration’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – last invoked to detain Japanese Americans during World War II – as a legal basis to expel migrants.
The Trump administration has repeatedly clashed with federal judges, rights groups and Democrats who say it has trampled or ignored constitutionally protected rights in rushing to deport migrants, sometimes without due process.
“We’re getting closer and closer to a constitutional crisis,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., told CNN.
“Donald Trump is trying to pull us down into the sewer of a crisis.”
Trump has insisted he is protecting American citizens from a wave of undocumented migration – including, he says, murderers, terrorists and rapists – while carrying out the will of voters who returned him to the White House.
Last month, the Trump administration deported hundreds of migrants – most of them Venezuelan – to the maximum-security CECOT prison in El Salvador, alleging they were members of violent gangs.
In the most publicized case, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported to the El Salvador mega-prison without charge.
The administration later admitted that Abrego Garcia was included among the deportees due to an “administrative error,” and a federal court ruled the government must “facilitate” his return.
Trump has since doubled down, insisting Abrego Garcia is a gang member, including by posting an apparently doctored photo on social media Friday showing a gang symbol tattooed on his knuckles.
CECOT inmates are packed in windowless cells, sleep on metal beds without mattresses and are forbidden visitors.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., met with Abrego Garcia on Thursday and said the man was bewildered by his detention and felt threatened in prison.
On Sunday, Van Hollen challenged the Trump administration to provide evidence that it is respecting U.S. law in its deportation efforts.
“I’m OK with whatever the rule of law dictates,” he told CNN. “But right now, we have a lawless president ... a lawless president who is ignoring the order of the Supreme Court of the U.S. to facilitate (Abrego Garcia’s) return.”
“They need to put up or shut up in the courts of the U.S.”
