In mid-March of 2025, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt and his colleagues started hearing that the Trump administration might attempt a flagrantly lawless publicity stunt, involving migrant men, secret flights to El Salvador, a notorious gulag, and a total disregard for due process. Despite getting word that something was about to happen, and rushing into a Saturday night hearing, and then securing a TRO from DC judge James Boasberg, Lee and his colleagues were unable to prevent more than 250 men from being renditioned from Texas to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador. The legal cases spawned by the dramatic events of March 15th 2025 haven’t gone away, indeed they are reaching crucial milestones in the courts, raising foundational questions about the abuse of statutes and what it means to defy court orders. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt who is litigating these cases, to discuss the very high stakes of a set of cases that may have fallen off your radar in the shuffle.
How these cases play out will dictate much of what happens for the rest of Trump’s term in office by answering democracy-defining questions such as whether the antiquated and radical wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act can be unleashed on people the government deems enemies domestically, whether court orders are actually directives the Trump DoJ is bound to follow, whether the district courts can require Pam Bondi’s justice department to assist in the finding of fact, and whether the ancient legal concepts protecting liberty of due process and habeas corpus have the force of law in Trump’s America.
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