Trump Defies Courts as ‘Rule of Law’ Becomes a Punchline

President Donald Trump’s administration defied a federal court order on Saturday to halt deportations of migrants from the U.S. to El Salvador. It’s not the first time the Trump regime has ignored a court order but the scale and brazenness of the defiance really feels like a turning point for the country. And it’s unclear whether anything will stop Trump now that the country has reached such a lawless stage. Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act on Friday, a law from 1798 that gives the president enormous power in a time of war to deport people without judicial review. The problem, of course, is that the U.S. isn’t at war. The president insists we are, but simply saying “we’re at war” because you don’t like immigrants in some abstract way isn’t how it’s done. After Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, the ACLU sued to stop the deportations, which were already in the process of happening on Saturday. Planes were in the air, and based on the publicly available information, at le ... Read full article.