Last spring, Will Scharf, an arch-#conservative lawyer serving as the White House staff secretary, wrote a secret memo to the chief of staff that reflected growing unease in the West Wing about one of the extreme measures being weighed by #StephenMiller, the powerful adviser driving Trump’s #deportation campaign.

#Trump #HabeasCorpus #law #judiciary #SeparationOfPowers #ChecksAndBalances #Constitution #democracy #WhiteSupremacy #immigration

Dated April 29, 2025, & stamped “confidential,” the memo was careful & lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of #law. The subject line read: “THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS.”

#HabeasCorpus — the centuries-old right to force the government to justify, before a judge, why it has locked a person up — is enshrined in Article I of the #Constitution.

#Trump #law #judiciary #SeparationOfPowers #ChecksAndBalances #democracy #StephenMiller #WhiteSupremacy #immigration

Scharf’s memo, in its unassuming way, was a blinking red warning light. The 2nd #Trump White House was deliberating an explosive new claim of #PresidentialPower: the suspension of habeas rights for unauthorized #immigrants.

The suspension of #HabeasCorpus has occurred just a handful of times in US history, & always under the most dire circumstances of #war or #invasion.

#law #judiciary #SeparationOfPowers #ChecksAndBalances #Constitution #democracy #StephenMiller #WhiteSupremacy #immigration

Yet to a greater degree than previously known, admin ofcls, encouraged by #Trump, actively weighed taking that step in the early months of his 2nd term—this time to accelerate mass #deportation of immigrants…
Flush with a 2024 election victory, Trump & members of his team wanted to test how far the emboldened president’s authority could be pushed, setting off previously unreported internal struggles over where the limits should be.

#HabeasCorpus #law #judiciary #SeparationOfPowers #Constitution

The man who outlined his concerns in the memo, Mr. Scharf, was no resistance figure. A trim, balding, Harvard-trained lawyer who had run for office in Missouri, he had bemoaned John McCain as too moderate for the 2008 Republican nomination, & believed #Trump had been vindictively prosecuted after his 2020 election loss.

#HabeasCorpus #law #judiciary #SeparationOfPowers #ChecksAndBalances #Constitution #ExecutivePower #democracy #immigration

He had helped develop the #Trump team’s legal arguments behind the successful effort to get the Mar-a-Lago #ClassifiedDocuments indictment thrown out, as well as the arguments behind the presidential #immunity case that prevailed at #SCOTUS. He had embraced the most contentious elements of Trump’s agenda, but was quickly coming up against the limit of what the #Constitution, in his reading, could be made to bear.

#HabeasCorpus #law #judiciary #SeparationOfPowers #ExecutivePower #democracy

The #Constitution, Scharf wrote in his memo to #SusieWiles, the WH chief of staff, permits suspension of #HabeasCorpus only in cases of rebellion or invasion. #Courts have almost uniformly held that only #Congress can do it.

He added∶“Even where Congress has explicitly suspended habeas corpus rights, the Supreme Court has held that some alternative process must be provided to defendants, with procedural safeguards akin to a habeas corpus action.”

#Trump #law #ExecutivePower #Constitution