'Tissue-thin fiction': MSNBC's Rachel Maddow shreds Trump over court argument

MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow unloaded on the stunning number of legal challenges President Donald Trump is embroiled in as his MAGA administration continues to upend the federal government through massive cuts to federal programs and firings of government workers.

But there was one issue that has drawn legal scrutiny the primetime host zeroed in on that she told viewers on Friday “is just lighting up the country right now.”

“There is no shortage of fight, in no shortage of people, for no shortage of things that Trump is doing,” Maddow said. “But one issue in particular keeps rising to the top, and it's because of the extremism of what Trump is doing, specifically to immigrants.”

Maddow went on to call out the hardline immigration crackdown Trump initiated on day one of his new term as she eviscerated the administration’s ever-evolving justification behind the deportation of migrants to El Salvador "to the lawless, bizarre, draconian, forever prison there."

“The legal rationale for sending all these people to this prison in El Salvador appears to be a very tissue-thin fiction,” Maddow said.

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She cited a Washington Post report that detailed how Trump invoked a 17th-century wartime law where he proclaimed, “without evidence, that Tren de Aragua is perpetrating an invasion of the United States at the direction of the regime of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro."

The kicker in the Post report, the MSNBC host said, was that “the gang does not operate at the direction of Venezuela’s leader.”

And the “legal drama” is still playing out as of Friday night, Maddow added.

“And now tonight, the ACLU has been fighting in an emergency court hearing in Washington,” she told viewers. “And now, in an emergency application to the United States Supreme Court to try to stop Trump from what they think is yet another effort by the Trump administration tonight to prepare more planes full of men to be shipped off to that prison.”

“This is a legal drama, a legal emergency, that has been unfolding tonight," she said. "It is unfolding now as we speak."

Watch the video below via MSNBC or at the link here: