Laurence Tribe, constitutional law scholar and professor emeritus at Harvard University, thinks Americans understand the seriousness of President Donald Trump's administration defying an order from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Last week, the high court ruled 9-0 that the United States must "facilitate" the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland apprentice who came to the United States as a teenager 15 years ago.
Thus far, the administration has quibbled with various definitions of the word "facilitate."
"Judges of all stripes — appointees of the Trump administration, the [Barack] Obama administration, the George W. Bush administration, across the ideological spectrum, overwhelmingly, judges have said 'no,'" Tribe said about the idea of ignoring due process.
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"It's been possible so far for Trump to slither around the little gaps left in decisions and not openly defy the judiciary. But he is doing that now," Tribe said. "He is basically laughing and saying, I can't force El Salvador, a sovereign country, to release this guy. And the president of El Salvador says, 'I can't smuggle him into the United States.' And these two guys are looking at each other as though we are stupid and blind and don't realize that all Trump has to do is ask nicely, would you return this guy to us?"
Tribe said that there's no indication that the contract between the Trump government and El Salvador somehow makes the U.S. the "weak partner."
"We have the leverage," Tribe said. "We're paying this guy a ransom to enslave people that we send to him. If we say, 'send one back,' he's got to. He's done it for 10 people already. The American people are not so stupid, really, as to think that this is not open defiance of the rule of law. And the rule of law is not just some abstraction. All of us have to be protected by a set of rules that people play by."
He said that without society agreeing to rules and laws, "it's the law of the jungle. It's chaos. It's anarchy. It's might makes right, and that's the world that Trump likes."
He added: "Even though, ironically, as [former] Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) says, he's obviously a weak and impotent man if he can't bring back this one guy that the government admitted was lawlessly and mistakenly shipped out of the country to a place where a court had ordered he could not be taken."
According to his attorneys, García was legally authorized to live and work in the U.S. and fully complied with his legal responsibilities. "He did not have a criminal record in the United States," a SMART Union release said.
See the interview below or at the link here.
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