President Donald Trump engaged in “serious” discussions about suspending a key right enshrined in Article I of the Constitution in the early months of his second term, The New York Times revealed in a report published Monday, and to such an extent as to compel top White House officials to issue a “blinking red warning light.”
That constitutional right was habeas corpus, the legal mechanism ratified by the United States in 1788 by which individuals can challenge arbitrary detentions. The idea to suspend that right – at least, for undocumented migrants – came from White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, as was detailed in the forthcoming book viewed by the Times.
“When it came to suspending habeas corpus, one of the most powerful constitutional protections of individual rights, Mr. Miller was in effect encouraging something Mr. Trump had long dreamed of: bypassing judges in deportation cases,” the Times’ report reads.
“The president was interested. He asked advisers about Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas rights during the Civil War. Mr. Miller directed the Justice Department to study the issue.”
As the discussions turned “serious,” the Times reported, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf penned a memo for White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles with the subject line: “The Writ of Habeas Corpus.”
“Dated April 29, 2025, and stamped ‘confidential,’ the memo was careful and lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of law,” The Times wrote, describing the “secret” memo.
“A senior administration official, speaking on background because the official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, said for this article that ‘senior staff’ had requested the memos, and that they were seen by relatively few people,” The Times’ report reads.
“But the documents reflected alarm among a small group of senior aides. They felt that Mr. Miller’s eagerness to test the limits of executive power – and to accuse other branches of encroaching on it, echoing a president who bristled at any constraint – risked steering the administration, and the country, in a dangerous direction.”