Trump Ramps up Lawlessness With Plan to Ignore Supreme Court Ruling

Donald Trump’s administration is moving forward with more expedited deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—despite a Supreme Court ruling that requires it to provide advance notice and a court hearing.

In a new filing Friday, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that “dozens” of Venezuelan men held at the Bluebonnet Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, had received forms to expedite their removal from the United States under the AEA.

In a declaration, Attorney Karene Brown said that her client at Bluebonnet, who has a pending asylum claim and no removal order, had been approached by ICE agents Thursday and asked to sign a form that was only available in English.

Brown’s client only speaks Spanish, and he refused to sign the form. ICE agents informed him that the form was “coming from the president, and that he will be deported even if he did not sign it.”

An English-speaking Venezuelan man told her client that the form was a notice that he had been designated as a member of Tren de Aragua, and that he “must be removed” from the United States. He told her client that ICE had said he would be deported either Thursday or Friday to Venezuela.

Another man, Luis Yoender Mercado, who had a hearing scheduled for April 23, received a similar notice. He was told by ICE agents that he would be removed to El Salvador, according to a declaration from Michelle Brané, the executive director of an immigration nonprofit organization, who spoke directly with Mercado’s sister.

Brané said she had received messages from several people indicating that individuals at Bluebonnet were given notices that they were about to be removed.

In another declaration, attorney Travis John Collins said that his 18-year-old client at Bluebonnet had been “taken away” by ICE agents Thursday night, after being transferred to the facility earlier this week. Collin’s client’s father, who was also moved to Bluebonnet, saw his son through a window, who was crying as he held up a piece of paper.

“Another detainee who spoke English was able to read that the paper said, ‘Deportation.’ The country of removal was not visible,” Collins said. “Because he has no final immigration order, the government could only be seeking to remove him under the AEA, not the immigration laws.”

Collins’s young client and his relatives had originally been detained by ICE agents in March. Agents questioned the 18-year-old about a photograph of him holding a gun on Facebook, which they said proved his connection to TdA. According to Collins, the gun was actually a water pistol.

The ACLU’s filing stated that Brown’s client, “like other men against whom the Alien Enemies Act has already been used, does not have a final order of removal and is therefore not removable under the immigration laws.”

“There is no indication that, as with past AEA removals, lawyers were being provided with the form or told that their clients were being designated under the AEA,” the ACLU’s filing stated.

The ACLU asked the court to “certify a class” and grant a broader restraining order to prevent the removal of multiple individuals under the AEA.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that while the Trump administration could continue deportations under the AEA, it needed to provide detainees with the opportunity to file habeas corpus challenges, a complex and rarely successful legal procedure. The court also ruled that these needed to be filed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a MAGA-aligned court in Texas where the deportation flights are staged.

But crucially, detainees must be given the opportunity to “actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs,” the high court ruled. It seems the Trump administration is once again ignoring the order.

Members of the Trump administration have continued to insist that the Supreme Court’s ruling doesn’t actually require them to give due process to detainees.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor emphasized this crucial point in her dissent, writing that “the government cannot usher any detainees, including plaintiffs, onto planes in a shroud of secrecy, as it did on March 15, 2025,” and that it could not “immediately resume removing individuals without notice.”

“To the extent the Government removes even one individual without affording him notice and a meaningful opportunity to file and pursue habeas relief, it does so in direct contravention of an edict by the United States Supreme Court,” she wrote.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration has ordered another American citizen to leave the country immediately.

Pamela Rioles Saeed, an immigration attorney in Arizona, received an email from Customs and Border Protection telling her that her parole was revoked and she must leave the United States within seven days, she told KNXV-TV. Rioles Saeed is a Boston-born American citizen and is not on parole.

“I thought this was for one of my clients, but then I saw that it was addressed only to me,” she told KNXV-TV.

Rioles Saeed is at least the second American immigration attorney to report receiving an email from the Department of Homeland Security in the last week. On April 11, American citizen and Massachusetts-based immigration lawyer Nicole Micheroni received an email telling her to leave the country immediately or risk being “subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States.” Micheroni also thought the email was meant for one of her clients, she told NBC Boston.

The DHS recently sent out a number of parole termination notices in an effort to get immigrants to self-deport as soon as possible, a number of news outlets have reported. Saeed said that another attorney in her chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association had told her other lawyers in his office had received similar notices.

Some of the emails may have been sent to “unintended recipients,” such as lawyers representing those immigrants, by mistake, DHS said in separate statements to NBC Boston and KNXV-TV.

Rioles Saeed said she will ignore the statement for now and urged other American citizens who receive the message to do the same. “There is a true recklessness coming from the government and shows an intimidating attitude towards our immigrant clients,” she told KNXV-TV.

The threatening messages come amid the Trump administration’s aggressive and unlawful deportation efforts, which include revoking nearly 1,000 international student visas and disobeying court orders to deport more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants to a Salvadoran megaprison. The president has even publicly pondered the possibility of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—an illegal (and terrifying) but increasingly imminent possibility.

Americans are starting to see through Donald Trump’s economic promises as he continues to tank the economy with his volatile approach to global trade.

A new poll from The Economist/YouGov, conducted April 13–15, shows that Trump’s economic approval is at an all-time low. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the economy is getting worse, up 5 percent from “Liberation Day,” when Trump implemented reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent or more on about 90 countries, sending stock markets plummeting to a generational low. He then rescinded the majority of those tariffs days later (but increased the ones on China), causing confusion and chaos for consumers and small-business owners.

Three-quarters of voters said they thought tariffs “will increase the price of goods they buy,” and about two-thirds of Americans think the state of the stock market is Trump’s fault, according to the YouGov poll.

As data journalist G. Elliott Morris pointed out Friday in a Substack post, Trump’s average net economic approval in YouGov polls over the last month is -6 percent, the worst he’s ever polled as president. While handling the outbreak of Covid-19 during his first term, Trump’s net economic approval rating was 3 percent, Morris noted.

Trump ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the promise of economic prosperity and change for millions of Americans fed up with inflation and the high cost of living. He pledged an “end to the devastating inflation crisis,” lower prices, tax cuts, and a tariff scheme that would bolster American manufacturing. But as the likelihood of a recession inches closer, just three months into Trump’s term, people are clearly starting to lose faith in the president’s disastrous economic plan. Forty-two percent of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat oppose” Trump’s budget, and the percentage of Americans who say the economy is their top concern has increased since Trump took office, the poll found.

The president’s performance isn’t flailing in just the Economist/YouGov poll, either. Investor sentiment has only been lower a handful of times since this data started being recorded, including post-9/11 and during the 2008 global financial crisis, according to a review of economic polls from The Independent.

In a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents conducted April 4–9, nearly two-thirds of people said they don’t think Trump is handling inflation well and 58 percent think he is mishandling trade policy.

“Three months into his second administration, the honeymoon might be over for President Donald Trump,” Tatishe Nteta, the poll’s director, said in a statement. Hopefully he’s right.

Donald Trump’s “border czar,” Tom Homan, was pressed Thursday on CNN about the administration’s efforts to bring back wrongly deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador in accordance with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“Are you personally aware of any steps that have been taken to facilitate his return to the United States?” Kaitlan Collins asked Homan, citing Judge Paula Xinis’s assertion in federal court that the Trump administration has done “nothing” to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. Homan dodged the question and repeated the same lies.

“Look, I think he’s a citizen of El Salvador. He’s in El Salvador, he’s home. He’s a illegal alien with a final order of removal. He’s a MS-13 member, which is now classified as a terrorist,” Homan replied.

“So should I read that as to say nothing has been done to bring him back to the United States? That’s what it sounds like,” Collins said.

“I can’t speak to everybody in the administration. I can just tell you what my stance is, and uh, I think we did the right thing, I think he’s where he should be,” Homan said.

Homan’s response says everything about the intransigence of the Trump administration. They keep repeating that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member, despite the fact that he has no criminal record and is a member of a building trades union. The administration claims he’s been sent “home” when his U.S. citizen wife and children are in Maryland.

At this point, the Supreme Court has ordered the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., Xinis has ordered the government to provide her regular updates on the steps it is taking, and an appeals court has rejected the Trump administration’s request to halt these proceedings. It’s clear that the White House is intent on ignoring every judicial check on its power, refusing to acknowledge that it has to abide by due process and return Abrego Garcia to the United States.

Donald Trump is furious that Senator Chris Van Hollen was able to meet with a man his administration wrongly deported to El Salvador.

In a post on Truth Social Friday morning, Trump attempted to mock the Maryland Democrat, who traveled all the way to Latin America to find Kilmar Abrego Garcia, after the Trump administration had him placed in a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an “administrative error.”

“Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone. GRANDSTANDER!!!” Trump wrote.

But Van Hollen’s public crusade to reunite with his deported constituent was precisely what allowed them to meet. Although Van Hollen was initially denied access to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses, he’d made a strong case for being allowed access to Abrego Garcia. It’s still unclear exactly how the two were able to meet, but Van Hollen has promised to provide a “full update” on his return to the U.S.

The White House also took a shot on Van Hollen—in the most grotesque way possible.

In a post on X, Trump’s staff made a side-by-side of a photograph of Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garcia and one of Trump meeting with Patty Morin, the mother of Rachel Morin, a woman who was raped and killed by a Salvadoran man in 2023.

“We are not the same,” the post read.

The Trump administration has repeatedly trotted out Morin as a means of justifying its decision to send brown men who had nothing to do with that crime to a foreign prison.

But no one seemed more mad than El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, whom Trump paid $6 million to keep Abrego Garcia (and other deportees) in prison. He also attempted to ridicule Van Hollen’s meeting with Abrego Garica.

“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote on X.

“Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody,” Bukele wrote in a separate post.

The Trump administration has falsely claimed that Abrego Garcia was actually a “convicted” criminal and “top leader of MS-13,” despite only presenting thin evidence of Garcia’s gang affiliation. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a blistering ruling Thursday smacking down the White House’s latest attempt to stall Abrego Garcia’s return.

“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” the three-judge panel wrote in its unanimous ruling.

“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”