Sarah Longwell, publisher of the conservative outlet The Bulwark, claimed Monday on CNN's Inside Politics that the Trump administration's apparent refusal to comply with a federal judge's order was taking U.S. democracy down a dangerous path.
On Saturday, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return planes heading to Central America with deportees, but the order went unheeded. The judge planned a hearing for Monday afternoon to determine whether the administration outright ignored the order.
Longwell told host Dana Bash, "I think for a lot of us who were really concerned and alarmed by a Trump second term, one of the things that we thought may very well happen is that Trump was going to set himself up to deny court orders or just ignore them."
Longwell called the courts "one of the last refuges" for holding Trump accountable for some of his more outlandish actions.
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"He is going so fast to try to dismantle the government or implement his deportation policies, that he's showing a lot of disregard for the law. And so the judges, whether they're, you know, setting up injunctions or trying to slow him down, temporary restraining orders — there's going to come a point, we always thought, where Trump might just say, 'I'm going to start ignoring these court orders.'"
Longwell said Trump's strategy is to "pick the most unsympathetic people" to deport and Americans won't care that he's defying the law.
In fact, Vice President JD Vance wrote late Sunday that "there were violent criminals and rapists in our country" and "President Trump deported them."
"A lot of people are going to be like, 'I don't care about deporting gang members. These are bad people.' Now, we don't know exactly, we're not sure that they're gang members, we're just taking their word for it. But they do seem to be hitting the point now where they're trying to get by on a technicality...where they want to ignore what judges say. Which, once you get to that point, once you have a president who's just disregarding what judges say, you're in a totally lawless state."
The Trump administration has been accused of denying due process to the 200 Venezuelans deported on Saturday to El Salvador.