He has now said it right out in the open—not once but twice. In two major interviews, President Donald Trump openly declared that he has the power to bring the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States. And on both occasions, Trump said straight out that he is not doing so because administration lawyers have told him he doesn’t have to—or that he shouldn’t.
This has been widely seen as an admission that Trump is defying the Supreme Court, which has directed the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Yes, it is that. But these two moments are also their own story. They offer a unique glimpse into the deep rot of bad faith infesting Trump and Stephen Miller’s broader project to expand the president’s removal powers into something extraordinarily vast and entirely unaccountable. They also show how Trump is inadvertently sabotaging his case against Abrego Garcia—and that broader project as well—with his bumbling incompetence.
“Bringing him back and retrying him wouldn’t bother me,” Trump told Time magazine, admitting that he has this option. “But I leave that decision to the lawyers. At this moment, they just don’t want to do that.”
Trump was even more direct in a recent interview with ABC News. “I could,” Trump shrugged when asked if he could pick up the phone and get Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to release Abrego Garcia from the prison in that country where he is currently wasting away.
“If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that,” Trump continued. “But he’s not.” Trump added that “we have lawyers that don’t want to do this.”
By saying these things, Trump hasn’t just revealed that he is ignoring the Supreme Court’s directive. He has also opened up a new line of inquiry wide enough to drive a Tesla Cybertruck through.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, says he will now pursue answers to the many questions these admissions raise. This is doable because the federal district judge overseeing this case, Paula Xinis, has initiated discovery designed to reveal what steps, if any, the government has taken to facilitate his return, opening the way for depositions of administration officials.
“The president has now said on two occasions that he could easily bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the United States, but he’s been told not to do so,” Sandoval-Moshenberg emailed me. “We’re going to keep moving forward with the discovery process, with document requests and depositions, peeling back layer after layer of the onion, until we find out exactly which government officials gave him that instruction.”
Which lawyers have told Trump that he is not required to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return? What exactly transpired in these communications? Which top official—aside from Trump—is internally directing the lawyers to advise Trump this way? Are that official’s initials S and M?
“These lawyers appear to be obeying Stephen Miller and not the Supreme Court,” says Chris Newman, an attorney for the Abrego Garcia family. “Miller himself should be deposed under oath in federal court to determine his role in this ongoing affront to due process.”
Admittedly, it will be tough to get such answers. But as David Kurtz and Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo detail, Judge Xinis, who has also ordered Abrego Garcia’s return, has taken a stern line against the administration’s refusal to be forthcoming on what it’s doing toward that end. She seems determined to establish a blow-by-blow account of government malfeasance. So it’s plausible she will try to direct the administration to fill in unknowns about why Trump is refusing to act, given his open admission that he can do so at any time.
“Trump keeps saying that he has the power to bring Abrego Garcia back but that the only hangup is his lawyers,” Roger Parloff, a senior editor at the Lawfare website who has closely tracked this case, tells me. “Trump is saying he can do it, and he won’t. I think Judge Xinis will try to get to the bottom of that.”
At the very least, this opens a major new story line for reporters to plumb. And here’s why this matters: Trump’s admissions along those lines—and whatever more we learn about internal deliberations over this—badly sabotage the administration’s larger case for not bringing Abrego Garcia home.
The administration keeps arguing that Trump does not have the power to command Bukele to release Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran himself. That’s already a weak defense—we are paying El Salvador to hold people at Trump’s pleasure—but Trump’s admission that he can bring Abrego Garcia back anytime he wants makes it even weaker. If Trump genuinely conveyed to Bukele that he wants Abrego Garcia back, it would happen tomorrow.
What’s more, Trump and other top officials refuse to do this by insisting Abrego Garcia is a public safety menace based on his alleged MS-13 gang ties. The case for MS-13 ties is incredibly weak on its merits. But Trump’s admission that he can bring Abrego Garcia back and retry him for removal anytime he wants makes it even weaker. Trump’s rendition of him to El Salvador, which violated his “withholding of removal” status, was illegal. There is no reason whatsoever not to return him and then try to remove him through more lawful channels—by contesting that status or deporting him to a third country—as opposed to doing so illegally.
Trump has now admitted he can take this alternate path anytime he wants. So who is telling Trump not to? Who is directing that overall strategy? The more we learn along these lines, the more Trump’s whole case will collapse.
All this deals a blow to Trumpworld’s arguments in a deeper sense. Miller’s bigger argument is essentially that the president’s powers to remove people should be above challenge and unreviewable by definition. Miller appears to want Trump to have the power to declare undocumented immigrants to be terrorists and gang members by fiat; to have the power to absurdly decree them members of a hostile nation’s invading army, again by fiat; and then to have quasi-unlimited power to remove them, unconstrained by any court.
“The judicial process is for Americans,” Miller has said. “Immediate deportation is for illegal aliens.” He appears to want to dispense with due process for migrants entirely—the Constitution be damned.
Drunk with hubris and high on his sad little fascist fantasies, Miller believes he can bury Americans in propaganda about criminal migrants, seducing them into embracing unchecked presidential power as essential to securing public safety. But Trump’s blithe admission that he can follow the law on Abrego Garcia anytime he wants to—and is not doing so because someone, somewhere told him he doesn’t have to—reveals this as entirely unmoored from anything resembling public order and the rule of law. It’s lawless, arbitrary, and dictatorial—proudly so, in fact.
The more transparency we have gained into the rot of corruption and bad faith at the core of this whole saga, the worse it has come to look. Trump himself is exposing it all for what it truly is: the stuff of Mad Kings.
The post How Trump Accidentally Sabotaged His Own Case Against Abrego Garcia appeared first on New Republic.
