Steve Vladeck:
Well, I think there are two different things going on here. I mean, the first is, I’m not sure that his lawyers are actually telling him what the courts are telling them.
We’re seeing both in the hearing in the Abrego Garcia case and in the case of the other individual who a different federal judge in Maryland has ordered to be returned, we’re seeing the courts say, hey, we want you, government, to tell us what steps you have taken. Meanwhile, we have President Trump in public interviews saying he hasn’t even been asked by the lawyers to request from President Bukele that someone like Abrego Garcia be returned.
So, Amna, part of what’s happening here is a shell game, where the president’s saying one set of things publicly, where government lawyers are saying something else in court, and where there’s some disconnect in between. And what gets lost in the process is that there are not just these two folks who are still in detention and El Salvador, but upwards of 150 to 175 who were removed from the country back in March under the Alien Enemy act, which now we have multiple lower courts saying the government didn’t have the power to do.
So we have this tension between a president saying, I have done everything I’m supposed to do, and federal court saying, no, you haven’t. And I think we’re still in the middle of this story. We’re still going to have to see, when this goes back to the Supreme Court, which seems inevitable, are the justices going to require more than just these sort of ambiguous steps toward facilitating the release of these individuals from El Salvador?
