Habeas corpus
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“The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
I must say, the Judicial branch of our government certainly has been busy with this current administration. I found a website that is recording all the times the current Trump administration is being sued for #FOTUS’s outrageous executive orders and actions. Check it out: Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions They even have a newsletter signup to tell you what has happened each day. Last time I looked it was over 200 cases so far - and counting.
One term we’ve been hearing lately is habeas corpus. I’ve heard the term for years and never completely understood exactly what it meant, so I thought I would do a little digging to get clarity.
In United States law, habeas corpus ad subjiciendum (the full name of what habeas corpus typically refers to) is also called "the Great Writ," and it is not about a person's guilt or innocence, but about whether custody of that person is lawful under the U.S. Constitution.
The ‘Great Writ’ of habeas corpus has long had an iconic status as the ‘writ of liberty’ which ensured that no person could be detained in prison without being put to trial by a jury of his peers. According to the traditional version, popularized by Whiggish constitutional writers from the late seventeenth century onwards, the English constitution as embodied in the common law had, since time immemorial, striven to protect the fundamental rights of Englishmen and women, which included the right to personal liberty. The common law had supplied the writ of habeas corpus, which secured the provision of Magna Carta, that no freeman be imprisoned save by the judgment of a jury of his peers. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Whig version ran, kings with an absolutist bent sought to undermine ancient liberties, by claiming prerogative powers to imprison without trial, and by appointing supine judges who would not protect people's liberties. It took the triumph of Parliament to restore and perfect them. For William Blackstone, one of the key statutes which secured ‘the complete restitution of English liberty’ was the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, ‘that second magna carta’. As Blackstone put it:
‘Magna carta only, in general terms, declared, that no man shall be imprisoned contrary to law: the habeas corpus act points him out effectual means, as well to release himself, though committed even by the king in council, as to punish all those who shall thus unconstitutionally misuse him.’
Habeas Corpus in the United States pre-dates our Constitution. English colonists brought the concept of habeas corpus to American in the 17th century, and the writ of habeas corpus was common in several British colonies by the time of the American Revolution.
The framers of the Constitution recognized the significance of the writ and included it in the body of the Constitution in Article I, section 9, which states:
The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.
It was in the Constitution two years BEFORE the ratification of the Bill of Rights, which is a testament to the importance the framers placed on it. The First Federal Congress provided for the use of the writ through an act of September 24, 1789 (1 Stat. 81). Section 14 of that act gave all U.S. courts the power to issue writs of habeas corpus.
The records of the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia contain a series of approximately 450 habeas corpus cases dating from 1820 to 1863. These records illustrate how individuals either residing in or traveling through Washington, D.C., during these years relied upon the writ of habeas corpus to secure their release from unlawful confinement.
Why are we proud? We are proud, first of all, because from the beginning of this Nation, a man can walk upright, no matter who he is, or who she is. He can walk upright and meet his friend - or his enemy; and he does not fear that because that enemy may be in a position of great power that he can be suddenly thrown in jail to rot there without charges and with no recourse to justice. We have the habeas corpus act, and we respect it.” ~Dwight D. Eisenhower
In many criminal cases, the confined person relied upon the writ of habeas corpus to secure his legal right to be released on bail or otherwise released from illegal confinement. The habeas corpus records relating to criminal cases involve an array of charges, such as larceny, assault and battery, murder, counterfeiting, forgery, rioting, arson, mutiny on the high seas, fighting, and robbing the mail.
J.G.G. v. Donald J. Trump is the name of a class action and habeas corpus lawsuit by five Venezuelan men in immigration custody, threatened with imminent removal under the expected proclamation of US president Donald Trump invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
The litigation in J.G.G. v. Trump began with a pattern that has become all too familiar: The Trump administration hatched a plan, in secret, to use theories of virtually boundless executive power to effectuate the mass removal of noncitizens from the United States and then disregard, if not outright defy, the court orders resulting from litigation challenges. After the plaintiffs’ counsel at the ACLU and Democracy Forward got wind that the administration was planning mass removals under the AEA, they sought emergency relief in federal district court in Washington, D.C. (source: Lawfare)
I’m no lawyer, but based on what I’m reading, Trump and his loyalists are breaking the Constitutional rights of a lot of people. These are rights that were established hundreds of years ago — and they are just ignoring them.
“Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of person under protection of habeas corpus; and trial by juries impartially selected, these principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.” ~Thomas Jefferson
These are the foundations of modern democratic representative government and losing any of them represents our civil rights being eroded. What does an authoritarian government do?
Centralizes power (in process)
Removes or critically weakens democratic systems (in process)
Removes political plurality (not there yet)
Ignores the rule of law (yes)
Disregards separation of powers (Congress has been folded into the executive branch… judicial is still standing.)
After doing all this reading, I understand “The Great Writ” a little better and wonder where all of this is going to lead. According to the Constitution Article I, section 9, Trump and his loyalists are certainly not fulfilling their job to …
…solemnly swear that they would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that they would bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that they took this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that they would well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office.
I wonder whether Pam Bondi and all the other attorneys who are breaking the law can be disbarred? I don’t know how that would work.
From what I can tell, our only recourse to reverse the illegal behavior by our #FOTUS is Impeachment.
If Trump wasn’t even convicted for attempting a coup on January 6, 2021, what hope do we have that he would be convicted for ignoring hundreds of years of common law precedence?
Thought for the day in the honor of his birthday…
“If there is to be perpetual peace in a world of nation states, the individuals who live in them must be free, their human rights must be respected.”
~ John Peters Humphrey
Must Read Article:
Paul Dans (The Man Behind Project 2025’s Most Radical Plans) was a true believer in Donald Trump from the start, and by 2020, he had finally clawed his way to a job as a White House staffer. When Trump left office, Dans returned to private life but remained ready if the MAGA movement needed him… The call came in the spring of 2022, when Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, summoned him to Washington and asked him to convene policy thinkers from across the full sweep of the American right to write an aspirational agenda for the next Republican president.
The contributors Dans gathered believed that the Christian, right-wing nation they desired could come about only if Republicans stopped doing politics the way they always had and refused to accept the structure of the executive branch as it existed. They also understood that the faster a new president moved, the more he’d be able to achieve as the courts, Congress, and civil society struggled to keep up…
An obsessive focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs appears throughout Project 2025; that has become a recurring theme of the Trump presidency, leading to the removal of certain webpages about Black winners of combat medals and the purging of references to the Enola Gay, the atomic bomber whose name suddenly made it vulnerable to keyword-search deletion. Trump’s attempts to fire agency officials, in defiance of the law, reflect a conviction by Project 2025’s architects that any restrictions on the president’s hiring and firing powers inside the executive branch are unconstitutional, a position they hope to persuade the Supreme Court to bless…
Unlike some on the right, Project 2025 doesn’t treat climate change as a hoax, but it does view these programs as an impediment to the unfettered exploitation of fossil fuels, especially on federal land, that they want.
The second is a more organized campaign to promote conservative gender norms, traditional families, and Christian morality. Trump has already moved to limit transgender rights, but the Project 2025 agenda is much wider, aiming to return the United States to a country of married families with male breadwinners and female caregivers...
So far, everything is going according to plan.
Quote of the day:
“This administration has already overseen a wave of unconstitutional actions: raids without warrants, prolonged detentions without hearings and retaliatory deportations. Each case chips away at the rule of law. Each one makes it easier for the next to go unnoticed. And each one brings us closer to the authoritarianism we once believed could never take root on American soil. When a government begins to imprison writers for their words, when it abandons legal norms for political convenience, when it cloaks oppression in the language of national security, alarm bells must ring. Loudly.”
~Sen. Edward J. Markey, Rep. Jim McGovern and Rep. Ayanna Pressley
What I’m reading today…
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that you have to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. You haven't done so. Aren’t you disobeying the Supreme Court?
Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different.
Let me quote from the ruling. “The order properly requires the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador.” Are you facilitating a release?
I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you're saying. But I leave that to my lawyers. If they want—and that would be the Attorney General of the United States and the people that represent the country. I don't make that decision….
One more question on this, sir. You took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The Constitution says the Supreme Court is the ultimate authority once they issue a ruling. If you defy them, aren't you violating your oath?
I'm not defying the Supreme Court. I never defy the Supreme Court. I wouldn't do that. I'm a big believer in the Supreme Court, and have a lot of respect for the Justices.
An Immigrant Held in U.S. Custody ‘Simply Disappeared’
Mr. Prada’s disappearance has created concerns that more immigrants have been deported to El Salvador than previously known. It also raises the question of whether some deportees may have been sent to other countries with no record of it. U.S. authorities confirmed that he was removed from the United States. But to where?
Fortune 500 company abruptly fires lawyer who helped immigrant family
The targeting of Jackson is consistent with a larger effort by the Trump administration to harass and intimidate lawyers who assist undocumented immigrants.
In an April 7, 2025, decision in a habeas corpus case brought by lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union representing Venezuelans who faced deportation, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the government must give those it aims to deport the opportunity to legally challenge their removal from the U.S. This chance for due process when deprived of liberty is what habeas corpus is and does.
Since then, several federal judges have issued habeas writs blocking certain deportations from the U.S. and even movement of potential deportees from one state to another.
We Visited Rumeysa Ozturk in Detention. What We Saw Was a Warning to Us All.
We visited Ms. Ozturk earlier this week at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Basile, La., operated by the for-profit company Geo Secure Services, contracted by the federal government. It’s part of the network of ICE facilities in Louisiana that the American Civil Liberties Union has described as a “black hole” — hard to reach and isolated, making visits from lawyers and family members prohibitively difficult and expensive.
What we found was not just a young woman locked up without charge but also a democracy being put to the test. Ms. Ozturk is a graduate student, a writer and a community member who is in the United States legally on a student visa, which was revoked without apparent cause. She was walking to an Iftar dinner when federal agents, some of them masked, surrounded her, detained her, refused to explain why and then forcibly removed her to an undisclosed location; it took her family roughly 24 hours to even find out where she was being held….
Why did the Trump administration target her? By all accounts, it’s because she was one of the authors of an opinion essay for The Tufts Daily criticizing her university’s response to resolutions that the Tufts student senate passed regarding Israel and Gaza.
This is not immigration enforcement. This is repression. This is authoritarianism.
How you may find yourself on the front line of Trump's crackdown on immigration
This means that in coming months three of the bulwarks against Trump’s tyranny — the federal courts, state and local governments, and many of us as individual citizens — are likely to be attacked by the Trump regime for much the same reason: for protecting vulnerable people in our communities.
How the Trump Administration Flipped on Kilmar Abrego Garcia
The administration first called Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error,” then a “clerical error.” The words trivialized the decision to send a man to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without legal proceedings and in direct violation of a judge’s protective order. Officials insisted that the mistake could not be undone, disregarding a Supreme Court ruling instructing the administration to “facilitate” his return. Now the president and his advisers maintain, almost daily, that Abrego Garcia will never touch American soil again…But as criticism of the administration over its mishandling of the case spread, White House officials took over the response and began striking a far more strident tone in their public statements. They swiftly turned an admission of bureaucratic error into a political opportunity—a chance to flex executive authority and test the judicial branch’s ability to restrain presidential power.
Gulag is an acronym. So is CECOT
I wrote a book about the Gulag more than twenty years ago, and did not at the time think anything about it would be relevant to US politics. But here we are.
Afghans who fled the Taliban, including some who helped the U.S. military during America's 20-year war there, are facing the risk of deportation as the Trump administration moves to end legal protections for them.
Justice Department lawyers work for justice and the Constitution – not the White House
As more DOJ lawyers face choices between following political directives and upholding their profession’s ethical standards, they confront a critical question: To whom do they ultimately owe their loyalty? All attorneys have core ethical obligations, including loyalty to clients, confidentiality and honesty to the courts. DOJ lawyers have additional professional obligations: They have a duty to seek justice, rather than merely win cases, as well as to protect constitutional rights even when inconvenient.
Judges Worry Trump Could Tell U.S. Marshals to Stop Protecting Them
The marshals are in an increasingly bitter conflict between two branches of government, even as funding for judges’ security has failed to keep pace with a steady rise in threats.
As immigrant arrests surge, complaints of abuse mount at America’s oldest detention center in Miami
As President Donald J. Trump sought to make good on his campaign pledge of mass arrests and removals of migrants, Krome, the United States’ oldest immigration detention facility and one with a long history of abuse, saw its prisoner population recently swell to nearly three times its capacity of 600…At Krome, reports have poured in about a lack of water and food, unsanitary confinement and medical neglect. With the surge of complaints, the Trump administration shut down three Department of Homeland Security oversight offices charged with investigating such claims.
Wife of Wrongly Deported Dad Forced Into Hiding After Feds Publish Her Address
The wife of a Maryland man wrongly deported by the Trump administration to a prison in El Salvador said she moved to a safe house after the Department of Homeland Security posted her address online. Jennifer Vasquez Sura told The Washington Post that after DHS shared on X an unredacted court document from 2021, she began fearing for her safety and the well-being of her three children. “I don’t feel safe when the government posts my address, the house where my family lives, for everyone to see, especially when this case has gone viral and people have all sorts of opinions,” she told the paper. “So, this is definitely a bit terrifying. I’m scared for my kids.” DHS, in a statement to The Independent, justified its social media post, saying that “these are public documents that anyone could get access to.”
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan charged with 2 felonies in ICE case
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom.
Franklyn Gimbel, a prominent Milwaukee defense attorney and former federal prosecutor, called Dugan’s arrest “outrageous.”
“A person who is a judge, who has a residence who has no problem being found, should not be arrested, if you will, like some common criminal,” Gimbel said. “And I'm shocked and surprised that the U.S. Attorney's Office or the FBI would not have invited her to show up and accept process if they're going to charge her with a crime.”
100 Days In, Mass Deportation Is a Failure
Of course, in politics—especially Trump’s kind of politics—facts don’t matter as much as people’s perceptions. Trump’s immigration policies will succeed or fail depending on whether Americans view them as improving their lives. And there’s reason to think that Americans who wanted Trump to impose order on what they saw as a disorganized and anarchic immigration system instead see his immigration policies as contributing to chaos... a Reuters/Ipsos poll found Trump underwater on immigration for the first time, with 46% disapproving of his actions on the issue, compared to 45% approving. That was followed by a Economist/YouGov poll showing Trump with a net -5% approval on immigration, with a surprising 49% plurality calling his approach to immigration “too harsh.”
Civil rights groups sue to restore jobs at Homeland Security oversight offices that were gutted
Three advocacy groups are suing the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem, seeking to restore staff jobs at three gutted offices that oversee civil rights protections across the department’s broad mission.
The lawsuit was filed Thursday by the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization, the Southern Border Communities Coalition, and the Urban Justice Center.
On March 21, Homeland Security said it was implementing a reduction in force at the three offices: the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, and the Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman.
U.S. Sidelines Lawyers Who Doubted Their Own Case on Congestion Pricing
The U.S. Department of Transportation on Thursday said it took the extraordinary step of replacing the federal lawyers defending it in a lawsuit over New York City’s congestion pricing program, after accusing them of undermining the department’s bid to end the toll.
The move came after the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District, which had been handling the case, said it mistakenly filed in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday night a confidential memo that questioned the department’s legal strategy and urged a new approach.
Trump’s aggressive actions against free speech speak a lot louder than his words defending it
Trump issued the “Executive Order Restoring Free Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” on March 21, 2019. In it, he expressed the importance of free inquiry and open debate to education and directed federal officials to use the federal government’s funding of higher education to ensure that universities promote free inquiry. Channeling free-speech champions Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, Trump wrote that “free inquiry is an essential feature of our Nation’s democracy.”
But what is important is free speech reality, not rhetoric. Three months into his second term, where does Trump stand? The many interconnected orders, letters, statements and actions of Trump’s White House make an assessment of any positive effects difficult. On the other hand, the Trump administration has clearly violated and chilled free speech on many occasions.
What I am listening to…
What I am watching…
What I read every day…
