White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted to reporters on Tuesday that the White House is “complying with all court orders” just before delving further into the Trump administration’s latest misdirection in the case surrounding Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran national married to a U.S. citizen and living in Maryland whom Trump officials initially argued, in court filings and in court, had been deported by mistake.
“Deporting him back to El Salvador was always going to be the end result. There is never going to be a world in which this is an individual who is going to live a peaceful life in Maryland,” Leavitt said during Tuesday’s White House press briefing.
“Because he is a foreign terrorist and an MS-13 gang member. Not only have we confirmed that, President Bukele yesterday in the Oval Office confirmed that as well,” Leavitt continued, repeating the claim despite the fact that there is no evidence to support such a theory, and, in fact, new reporting suggests that the source of the information (a Maryland police officer) is not a credible narrator (and may have given “confidential information about a case to a sex worker,” per The New Republic).
“So he went back to his home country, where he will face consequences for his gang affiliation and his engagement in human trafficking. I’m not sure what is so difficult about this for everyone in the media to understand,” Leavitt concluded.
There are some signs that the White House might pivot further into this delusion — that it did not make a mistake in deporting Abrego Garcia — after Stephen Miller’s outburst in the Oval Office Monday, when he aggressively misstated the actual outcome of the Supreme Court’s opinion in the the case. The high court issued an unsigned opinion last week saying the White House must take steps to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. Miller claimed both during the Oval Office meeting and in media appearances later on Monday that the Trump administration had “won” 9-0 at the Supreme Court. Per my colleague Josh Kovensky:
Miller went further: he claimed falsely that Trump had won at the Supreme Court, and repeated an assertion first seen in a government declaration filed in Abrego Garcia’s case Sunday evening. He said that because Secretary of State Marco Rubio had declared MS-13 a terrorist organization, that overrides the immigration court order barring Abrego Garcia’s removal.
In remarks on Fox News Monday, Miller repeated this outlandish “we won” delusion:
So we appealed to the Supreme Court and it said clearly no District Court can compel the president to exercise his Article II foreign powers in any way whatsoever. DOJ called me after the Supreme Court ruling and said: ‘This is amazing we won the case 9-0, we are in excellent standing here.’
So this has been portrayed wrong for 72-hours in the media. They said the most a court can ever compel you to do is facilitate return, which would basically mean if El Salvador voluntarily sends him back we wouldn’t block him in the airport, we would put him back in ICE detention and then he would be deported back to El Salvador or somewhere else.
The Supreme Court said that’s the most the government can be expected to do. So, we won the case, handily. The misreporting on this has been atrocious.
He then pivoted to the course-correcting that’s been expected, on some level, since Attorney General Pam Bondi placed the DOJ lawyer who acknowledged the administration’s mistake on administrative leave. CNN reported Tuesday that the immigration lawyer, Erez Reuveni, has since been fired by the Justice Department.
“He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador,” Miller said Monday. “This was the right person sent to the right place.”
In Unsurprising News
Trump will officially skip the White House Correspondents Dinner this year, an event he scorned and did not attend during his first administration. Axios has the scoop here.
It comes amid the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on precedent and press freedom, a lifelong battle for Trump that he’s recently taken to the next level. The White House took over the coordination of the schedule for the pool of reporters that cover the President earlier this year. It has instructed Congress to defund NPR and PBS. And just yesterday, it defied a court order that required the White House to lift its ban on allowing the Associated Press to cover pool events.
Grassley Acknowledges Congress Does, In Fact, Have Some Power Over Executive Branch
In a sign that the Trump administration’s handling of the Abrego Garcia case may have broken through even in deep red pockets of the country, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was questioned by constituents at a town hall in Lee County, Iowa this week. They asked if he intended to stand up to the White House about its defiance of the Supreme Court.
“A constitutional crisis exists when you have a president who ignores the Supreme Court,” a constituent asked, per the Washington Post. “You have a Congress who fails to rein in a third branch of our government now violating our Constitution.”
Grassley reportedly responded limply, arguing the Supreme Court doesn’t have the power to dictate what El Salvador does. He then acknowledged that impeachment might be the only way to stop a hypothetical president who hypothetically defies the judiciary. Per WaPo:
Constituents then asked Grassley what Congress can do to ensure that Trump complies with the Supreme Court ruling. Grassley noted that the only power Congress has “in regard to discipline the executive branch” is impeachment.
House Dems Want Official Delegation To El Salvador
While Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) are reportedly planning to travel to El Salvador in coming days if Abrego Garcia is not soon returned to the United States, a handful of House Democrats are trying to take an official congressional delegation to the country. Van Hollen also requested a meeting with El Salvador’s president while in the U.S. The Senate has already authorized an official congressional delegation to travel to the prison.
Reps. Robert Garcia (D-CA) and Maxwell Frost (D-FL) are requesting that House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-KY) authorize an official CODEL to El Salvador to “conduct a welfare check” on Abrego Garcia, and others being held at CECOT. Axios was first to obtain the letter to Comer, in which the two House Dems said they’d be happy to include Republican members of the oversight panel in their travel plans.
In Case You Missed It
Judge Orders Expedited Discovery Over Administration’s Abrego Garcia Defiance
Trump II Hits A New All-Time Low In Oval Office Debacle
Yesterday’s Most Read Story
Bukele’s Offense Against the American People
What We Are Reading
Abrego Garcia and MS-13: What Do We Know?
Frist? No cat, sadly. But Frank.
so, can they invite Amber Ruffin back to host now? Because it’s a damn crime that we won’t get to experience that.
Liar!!! Don’t f_ck with the American people!!
Deporting people: Mother Jones has an essay about the use of AI to do things like facial recognition of persons in protest crowds or zip through data bases for key words or names in context to select candidates for deportation.
As I write this, I’m listening to a discussion on TV about the administration ignoring court orders and Congress, the members of which have become ineffectual.
.
Skipping straight to the sentence of exile is a gross violation of the clear language of the 14th amendment.
When the press secretary claims, without evidence, without a court review, without a trial, without even a hearing, that a father living peacefully in Maryland and married to a US citizen is a gang member, this is slander.
I’ve repeatedly said that the United States government owes this man money. Yes that’s my taxes, but it is my fellow taxpayers who voted for this government. We should have to pay, and the figure should be at least eight digits long.
I am ashamed of America.