‘We are not stopping’

In court and the media, the Trump administration spent Monday asserting its power to deport asylum seekers without due process—and to ignore judges who get in the way.

“We are not stopping,” Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, told Fox News on Monday. “I don’t care what the judges think.”

A similar message was reportedly delivered in a less direct way at the federal courthouse in Washington, where Trump administration lawyers refused to give direct answers to Judge James Boasberg’s questions about the deportation of over 200 Venezuelans over the weekend. Boasberg was trying to figure out the timeline of those deportation flights—some of which seem to have departed after he issued an order on Saturday halting them—but Justice Department attorneys said they could not disclose more information due to “national security” reasons, The New York Times reports.

Of course, the White House’s social media team had no such concerns as it gleefully bragged about sending dozens of people to a Central American prison without any proof of their guilt.

Trust the process. The bigger issue—one that was not part of Monday evening’s hearing—is whether Trump has the authority to deport anyone under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows deportations to occur without due process. Trump invoked the law on Saturday when he declared that members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan drug gang, had “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare” against Americans.

The White House says most of the migrants deported over the weekend were believed to be Tren de Aragua members (while others were part of MS-13, a different gang). However, immigration attorneys have pointed out that the administration has not released detailed information about the individuals or explained why they were chosen for deportation.

REPORTER: How do you determine whether somebody is a gang member? What criteria do you use?HOMAN: Through various investigations

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-03-17T15:48:22.871Z

This is why due process matters. There’s a key difference between “suspected of being in a drug gang” and “yep, we know that guy is a member of a drug gang.” Eroding that distinction has all sorts of bad implications for freedom.

A troubling pattern. The Trump administration’s determination to ignore due process for would-be deportees would be worrying even if it were happening in a vacuum. However, that’s not the case. From the relatively low-stakes willingness of the Department of Government Efficiency to move fast and not wait for permission, to the Trump administration’s attempt to punish law firms for working with the administration’s opponents, and its ongoing attempt to undermine birthright citizenship, the White House is showing little regard for limits on executive authority.

On several different issues, the Trump administration’s “actions reflect an unorthodox conception of American government in which the president pushes his powers to the outer limits, with diminished regard for the checks and balances provided by the legislative and judicial branches,” is how The Wall Street Journal summarized things on Monday.

What’s it all mean? It may be too soon to call this a full-blown constitutional crisis—though, as a general rule, presidents should not behave as if judicial rulings are optional. We’re in roughly the same territory as when Joe Biden blew off the Supreme Court and did student loan forgiveness anyway—except with higher stakes since there are human lives and not just taxpayer dollars hanging in the balance.

Here’s what seems more certain: Due process (yes, even for suspected drug gang members) is not something that ought to be swept aside in the name of efficiency or “fighting law and order,” as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accidentally phrased it on Monday. Indeed, the value of due process and other checks on executive power is that they are inefficient. That’s why the system requires that the government proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt.

Trump is not clearing that bar right now, and the White House’s unserious approach to these important issues suggests a worse crisis could be coming.

There are three simple reasons the Trump administration is targeting so many legal immigrants for deportation (in order):

1. It’s easy to find and deport them,
2. There aren’t that many illegal immigrant criminals, and
3. The administration doesn’t like legal immigration.

— The Alex Nowrasteh (@AlexNowrasteh) March 17, 2025

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: Get your popcorn ready: Another 80,000 pages of unredacted files about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy are supposed to be released on Tuesday. It’s all probably another nothingburger, but one positive sign is that the release is being handled by the National Archives rather than a bunch of right-wing influencers.

Just talked to @USNatArchives.
All JFK files being released tomorrow will be housed at the below link. ⬇️https://t.co/dVS0KZLecM ????

— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) March 18, 2025

QUICK HITS

• A midwife was arrested in Texas and charged with illegally performing abortions in violation of the state’s ban. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Maria Margarita Rojas was charged with a second-degree felony.
• Israel shattered a ceasefire deal with a large bombing campaign in Gaza. The attack reportedly killed over 400 people.
• Two astronauts stranded at the International Space Station for nine months are on their way back to Earth this morning.
• “Donald Trump’s allies have pivoted from denying that his tariffs will hurt consumers to insisting that consumers should welcome the pain,” writes Scott Lincicome in The Atlantic.
• Semisonic, the ’90s alt-rock trio best known for “Closing Time,” was unwillingly drawn into Monday’s immigration drama when the White House used that song in a disgraceful video celebrating deportations. Their second album was one of the first CDs I owned as a kid, so please enjoy this underappreciated bop as a palate cleanser: