A senior White House official said on Friday that US President Donald Trump, as part of his sweeping immigration crackdown, is looking at suspending habeas corpus, the right of a person to challenge their detention in court.
“The Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters.
“So it’s an option we’re actively looking at,” Miller said. “A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
Photo: Reuters
Trump campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants and has repeatedly referred to their presence in the US as an “invasion.”
Since taking office in January, Trump has been seeking to step up deportations, but his efforts have met with pushback from multiple federal courts, which have insisted that migrants targeted for removal receive due process.
Among other measures, the Republican president invoked an obscure wartime law in March to summarily deport hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
Several federal courts have blocked further deportations using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and the US Supreme Court also weighed in, saying migrants subject to deportation under the act must be given an opportunity to legally challenge their removal in court.
The act was last used to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II and was previously invoked during the War of 1812 and World War I.
Suspending habeas corpus could potentially allow the administration to dispense with individual removal proceedings and speed up deportations, but the move would almost certainly be met with stiff legal challenges and end up in the Supreme Court.
It has been suspended only rarely in US history, most notably by then-president Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War and in Hawaii after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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