Key Points – President Trump and his allies are exhibiting increasing hostility towards federal court rulings that limit his administration’s aggressive deportation policies.
-Following a recent 7-2 Supreme Court decision upholding a temporary block on deportations under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act due to due process concerns, prominent supporters like Matt Walsh openly urged President Trump to ignore the ruling. Trump himself amplified claims of “illegal injunctions.”
-This rhetoric emerges as the Supreme Court also considers challenges to Trump’s executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship, intensifying concerns about executive overreach and respect for judicial authority.
Donald Trump at War with the Supreme Court?
Donald Trump, since becoming president again, has occasionally lost in court, as has happened from time to time with most presidents. But he and his allies haven’t taken it as well as most.
Some conservative Trump supporters, like Matt Walsh, have openly called for Trump to ignore the Supreme Court’s rulings, such as a recent one on granting due process, in some instances, before people can be deported.
“It’s illegitimate. It’s ridiculous. Trump should ignore it. That’s the only answer. The Supreme Court doesn’t have the authority to tell the president that he can’t deport illegal aliens,” Walsh recently said, as reported by Media Matters. “They don’t have the authority to set up — to set policy on, you know, on how that is carried out. They don’t have any authority to do that.”
Trump, for his part, shared a post on Truth Social from pro-Trump attorney Mike Davis, arguing that the Supreme Court “has an illegal injunction” on the president. The post also suggested that Trump should “house these terrorists near the Chevy Chase Country Club” (it’s not clear who he thinks are “terrorists,” but it doesn’t appear that anyone involved in any of the cases has faced terrorism charges.)
Other Trump backers have bashed individual Supreme Court Justices, especially the Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett, for ruling against the Trump Administration, as if it were an American legal standard for justices to maintain loyalty to the president who appointed them.
The Reality of the Situation
In truth, neither the Supreme Court nor any other court has ruled that Trump does not have the right to deport people. The rulings have been much more narrow.
Last week, in a 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court continued a temporary block on deportations that specifically invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. “THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” Trump replied on Truth Social.
Per Yahoo News, the Court found that the Administration “violated due process by giving migrants just 24 hours’ notice before being sent packing and providing them with insufficient information to mount a defense.”
Other court rulings have been even narrower than that, referring to people from specific countries or others applying within certain districts.
However, with the many cases involving immigration and deportation currently in the courts, and more to come, these types of court decisions are likely to continue coming down for the foreseeable future.
And another thing likely to happen is some final determination from the Supreme Court on some of the big questions, including whether the Alien Enemies Act applies to deportations of what the Administration says are members of specific street gangs, as well as the Administration’s threats to eliminate birthright citizenship and even habeas corpus. And what if the Supreme Court rules, and the Administration decides to ignore it?
Birthright Citizenship Lives
Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic, looked at what might happen with Trump’s efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship.
“Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for undocumented immigrants—which flagrantly overrides law, Supreme Court precedent, and the text of the Fourteenth Amendment—has, at least for now, reached the justices primarily as a procedural question,” Serwer writes. “At issue during oral argument before the Court was the constitutionality of nationwide injunctions put in place by district-court judges, rather than the merits of the order itself.”
Serwer notes that a sudden removal of birthright citizenship would lead to instant chaos, including that “an entire class of stateless infants would be created overnight.”
He also shared an oral argument made by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, pointing to an analogy of something a liberal president could do:
“So when a new president orders that because there’s so much gun violence going on in the country, and he comes in and he says, ‘I have the right to take away the guns from everyone,’ then he sends out the military to seize everyone’s guns, we and the courts have to sit back and wait until every named plaintiff gets—or every plaintiff whose gun is taken comes into court?”
About the Author: Stephen Silver
Stephen Silver is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, and contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. For over a decade, Stephen has authored thousands of articles that focus on politics, technology, and the economy. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @StephenSilver, and subscribe to his Substack newsletter
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