Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig challenged the legal theory floated by Donald Trump aide Stephen Miller surrounding the administration’s deportation of a Maryland father who officials have admitted was illegally transported to a high-security prison in El Salvador.
“What Stephen Miller said there is straight up wrong,” Honig said Monday in an analysis after the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants.
The CNN legal analyst broke down the ruling – which he said came with “really important guardrails” – but first took on Miller's post on X that Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “…ineligible for any form of relief under law. The only process he was entitled to was deportation.”
“That's flat-out wrong by Stephen Miller,” Honig insisted. “Even the six conservative justices say anyone is allowed to go into court to challenge this.”
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He added that the difference is that “the majority, the conservative justices, said, ‘you have to do it through this thing called habeas,’ which has to be filed in the district where the actual person is being held. The liberals wanted to give broader rights to challenge this in court more broadly, geographically and with respect to how they challenge it.. Everyone agrees you can challenge this in court.”
Honig went on to tell CNN’s Anderson Cooper that while Monday night’s Supreme Court ruling “is a win for the trump administration,” there are two key aspects that the high court added in.
“The two key guardrails that you hit on, first of all, all nine justices agree that any deportee under this act does have a right to go to the courts and to challenge it,” he said. “And the second part is they have to be given reasonable advance notice so that they actually, as a practical matter, can get to the courts and not be whisked away in the middle of the night like was originally done in this case.”
Watch the video below via CNN, or at the link here.