A small group of arch-conservative lawyers inside the Trump White House quietly fought back against Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance’s push to suspend constitutional rights, according to internal memos and accounts drawn from a forthcoming book on Donald Trump’s second term.
The internal resistance — remarkable in an administration that rarely tolerates dissent — centered on proposals pushed by Miller to habeas corpus to accelerate deportations and invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy military force against immigration protesters, reported New York Times correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan in their forthcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”
In both cases, it was not Democrats or federal judges who blocked the moves, but Trump’s own senior staff.
The key figure was Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and a Harvard-trained lawyer who had helped build the legal arguments behind Trump’s presidential immunity victory at the Supreme Court. Scharf was no moderate. He had embraced the most contentious elements of Trump’s agenda and believed the former president had been politically persecuted after 2020, but he drew a line on these radical proposals.
In a confidential memo dated April 29, 2025, addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Scharf laid out a meticulous legal case against suspending habeas corpus — the centuries-old right allowing individuals to challenge their imprisonment before a judge.
The memo traced the right to the American Revolution, noted it had been formally suspended only four times in U.S. history, all during wartime, and warned that any attempt to suspend it without congressional authorization would almost certainly be struck down in court, creating a costly and self-inflicted legal crisis.
“Denial of habeas corpus rights was a key grievance underlying the American Revolution,” Scharf wrote, adding that all three branches of government had historically been reluctant to interfere with the right “only in the direst of circumstances.”
Miller, the administration’s immigration hard-liner, had been pushing the idea as a way to bypass federal judges who were slowing deportations. The president was receptive, asking advisers about Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War-era suspension of the writ. But Scharf’s memo, combined with skepticism from White House Counsel David Warrington, helped stall the proposal. Some West Wing officials privately called the idea “insane.”
The second confrontation came in late January, when Vance walked into a senior staff meeting and pressed for immediate invocation of the Insurrection Act following protests in Minnesota, where federal agents had shot and killed two American citizens during immigration enforcement operations. Vance argued swift action would deter future unrest and Miller supported the move.
Scharf again pushed back, arguing the law simply did not fit the circumstances, and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair reinforced the point politically, asking the room what the Insurrection Act would actually achieve that existing powers could not. Nobody had a convincing answer, and White House communications director Stephen Cheung expressed his concerns about the public relations emergency the move would present.
The meeting ended without a decision. The Insurrection Act was not invoked.
However, the reporters noted that the notion of suspending habeas corpus has not been set aside and remains in consideration by some White House insiders who see the law as a potent way to test the limits of presidential power.
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