05-01-2025, 01:15 PM
from The Atlantic Daily newsletter
The executive branch continues to try to dodge both the law and what courts have ordered it to do. Talking Points Memo reports that the men are now Schrödinger’s detainees—not clearly in the custody of the U.S., which arrested them and is paying El Salvador to house them, nor in the custody of El Salvador, which has no obvious authority to hold them. The legal scholar Ryan Goodman notes that the executive branch claims in another case that it didn’t have to follow a court order barring the departments of Justice and Homeland Security from deporting some people, because—aha!—they transferred the detainees to Defense Department planes for final delivery to El Salvador. Goodman doesn’t believe that this passes legal tests, and it certainly doesn’t pass the test of basic logic.
This insulting legal cutesiness was always the plan. The Trump administration understood that the deportations it was undertaking were legally dubious, and it sought to get around legal protections by whatever means it could. If the people who are getting arrested are really the cold-blooded criminals the executive branch insists they are, saying so in a court of law should be relatively easy, and the reluctance to even try implies otherwise. The White House can’t uphold “law and order” by discarding it in the cases of these detainees. The rule of law demands justice for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—and for many others too.
The executive branch continues to try to dodge both the law and what courts have ordered it to do. Talking Points Memo reports that the men are now Schrödinger’s detainees—not clearly in the custody of the U.S., which arrested them and is paying El Salvador to house them, nor in the custody of El Salvador, which has no obvious authority to hold them. The legal scholar Ryan Goodman notes that the executive branch claims in another case that it didn’t have to follow a court order barring the departments of Justice and Homeland Security from deporting some people, because—aha!—they transferred the detainees to Defense Department planes for final delivery to El Salvador. Goodman doesn’t believe that this passes legal tests, and it certainly doesn’t pass the test of basic logic.
This insulting legal cutesiness was always the plan. The Trump administration understood that the deportations it was undertaking were legally dubious, and it sought to get around legal protections by whatever means it could. If the people who are getting arrested are really the cold-blooded criminals the executive branch insists they are, saying so in a court of law should be relatively easy, and the reluctance to even try implies otherwise. The White House can’t uphold “law and order” by discarding it in the cases of these detainees. The rule of law demands justice for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—and for many others too.
