Trump v. Justice

The Trump administration is paying El Salvador’s government to imprison a legal resident of the United States in a notorious torture prison. The prisoner has committed no crime, nor is there any evidence he belongs to any “terror group.”

See if you can guess why?

Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, who traveled to El Salvador to advocate for the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, told reporters that El Salvador’s vice president, Félix Ulloa, said that the country was keeping Abrego Garcia in detention because the Trump administration was paying for them to hold him.

“I asked the vice president if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and the U.S. courts have found that he was illegally taken from the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CECOT?” Van Hollen said.

“And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying the government of El Salvador to keep him in CECOT,” he added, referring to the notorious maximum security prison where dozens of deported migrants have been sent.

Good for Van Hollen. There are plenty of Democrats in Congress who have what the party needs in terms of leadership, but they don’t happen to be in positions of leadership at present. That needs to change.

Speaking of which, I wonder what Chuck “Ignoring Court Orders Would Really Be a Constitutional Crisis” Schumer thinks of this?

A federal judge in Washington threatened on Wednesday to open a high-stakes [criminal] contempt investigation into whether the Trump administration violated an order he issued last month directing officials to stop planes of Venezuelan migrants from being sent to El Salvador.

In a 46-page ruling, the judge, James E. Boasberg, said he would begin contempt proceedings against the administration unless the White House did what it has failed to do for more than a month: give scores of Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador under the expansive authority of a wartime law called the Alien Enemies Act a chance to challenge their removal.

“The court does not reach such conclusions lightly or hastily,” wrote Judge Boasberg, who sits as the chief judge in Federal District Court in Washington. “Indeed, it has given defendants ample opportunity to explain their actions. None of their responses has been satisfactory.”

Judge Boasberg’s threat of contempt proceedings, coupled with another federal judge’s move on Tuesday to open a similar inquiry in a separate deportation case, represented a remarkable attempt by jurists to hold the White House accountable for its apparent willingness to flout court orders.

Note to our ever-feckless media: there is indeed something remarkable happening here, but it isn’t federal courts trying to get the government to stop ignoring court orders.