Monday on MSNBC’s “The Beat,” civil rights attorney Maya Wiley said that the Supreme Court issued an emergency order early Saturday morning, stopping the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants after he joked about deporting American citizens.
Wiley said, “We are seeing an administration that is intentionally creating chaos for people by saying we’re going to take what we believe to be or assert as our power of the pen to define whole groups of people we think can be removed, in this case, when it comes to Venezuelan migrants, we’re going to say, we’ll just unilaterally say, if you are a in a group, we will determine as a terrorist group, even though we have laws, even though we have courts, even though we have prosecutors who can address any crimes by those individuals.”
She continued, “Remember what you’re describing that happened at the Supreme Court over the weekend was unprecedented in the sense that it was so quick.”
Wiley added, “One of the reasons we saw this out of the Supreme Court is because it was extraordinary circumstances. What they had seen was that we had an administration that said to a district court judge order, ‘Return people, bring those planes back, give them due process, too late.’ And in the case of Kilmer saying, go bring him back, do what you can. The Supreme Court said, facilitate it and then Donald Trump, with a noted publicly named authoritarian leader President Bukele, whose prison is a notorious human rights violating prison essentially says, ‘Yeah I don’t have to do it.’ And then Trump jokes about the homegrowns.”
She concluded, “So the signal that this administration has sent and that people are responding to across the political spectrum is wait, wait, wait, if we let you do this, we’re essentially saying anybody, any president can do this.”
Follow Pam Key on X @pamkeyNEN
