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Glenn Greenwald: Americans' Liberties Are in Danger

Glenn Greenwald: Americans' Liberties Are in Danger

Just Asking Questions

April 24, 20251h 28m

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Show Notes

Why was a man who was legally protected from deportation sitting in one of the world's most notorious prisons in El Salvador? This week on Just Asking Questions, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald returns to discuss a case that cuts to the heart of American constitutionalism and due process. Greenwald, known for his reporting on the National Security Agency and his founding role at The Intercept, has become one of the most consistent civil libertarian voices in politics. He joins Liz Wolfe and Zach Weissmueller to break down how and why the Trump administration ignored a court order to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and why this defiance should concern everyone, regardless of their politics.

But this episode goes beyond one case. It's about the creeping normalization of lawless executive power—from the misuse of antiterror labels, to the fast-growing deportation dragnet sweeping up even lawful residents, to proposed federal overhauls of speech and campus expression.

Abrego Garcia was moved from El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, to a lower security facility in Santa Ana on April 20.

Sources Referenced:

Chapters
  • 00:00 Coming up…
  • 00:21 Introduction and setup
  • 01:13 The Abrego Garcia case and due process violations
  • 11:00 Trump's legal defiance and the Supreme Court's unanimous rebuke
  • 17:15 Parallels to the war on terror and the misuse of the word terrorist
  • 23:30 The threat to American citizens and executive overreach
  • 30:00 The limits of Supreme Court enforcement and implications for democracy
  • 37:20 Civil liberties, citizenship, and the universal reach of the Constitution
  • 42:00 Is this a constitutional emergency? Parsing Ezra Klein's warning
  • 48:00 Free speech crackdown: protests, deportations, and political enemies
  • 56:00 Activist surveillance groups and foreign influence in U.S. policy
  • 01:06:30 Chris Rufo, ideological capture, and the right's new institutional strategy
  • 01:13:45 Institutional cowardice vs. backlash: What happens next?
  • 01:20:00 Can civil institutions resist authoritarian pressure?
  • 01:24:00 Pardoning Edward Snowden and the unpredictable nature of Trump

This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting.

Zach Weissmueller: What happens when a president ignores the Supreme Court? Just asking questions. Glenn Greenwald is here today. He needs no introduction to our audience other than to note you can find his work at the System Update Rumble channel, as well as subscribing to GlennGreenwald.locals.com.

We invited him because he's a consistent and non-partisan critic of state power. Doesn't matter who's president. And so that makes him the perfect guest to talk with us today about the threats we are seeing to due process, free speech, the US Constitution emanating from the Trump administration as it deports people to a Salvadoran prison, ignores court orders, cracks down on certain kinds of campus speech, and more.

Glenn, thank you for coming back on the show today.

Glenn Greenwald: Great to be with you guys. Thanks for having me.

Liz Wolfe: I want to walk our viewers through what happened to a man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is from El Salvador. He entered the United States illegally back in 2012. Um, but in 2019, sort of soliciting his services as a day laborer, he was arrested in a Home Depot parking lot along with three other men. The police in Prince George's County, Maryland, claimed that he was MS-13 affiliated. How did they know this? Because an informant told them so, allegedly, and because the men that he was arrested with were apparently confirmed gang members, you know, with drugs on them, meaning a small bag of weed.

Basically, they, you know, looked at his tattoos, his Chicago Bulls hoodie, and they've claimed that he's MS-13. In the years after that arrest in 2019, Abrego Garcia married a US citizen, he fathered a child, he's taken care of the two children that his wife has from a prior relationship. And he's an apprentice, you know, gainfully seeking employment. And he's basically been able to successfully convince an immigration judge that he is worthy of withholding of removal status, which protects him from deportation back to El Salvador because he convinced the judge that he has a credible threat of persecution back in his home country from a rival gang that was targeting his family and extorting them due to their purportedly successful pupusa business.

Abrego Garcia was deported to El Salvador's CECOT prison on March 15. And since then, this case has garnered an awful lot of attention, in part because his wife is speaking out on his behalf, in part because his representative has flown down to El Salvador to meet with him face-to-face and get confirmation that he's okay. And in part because the Trump administration initially admitted that it made an error, an administrative error in deporting him because this withholding of removal. But then a bunch of officials, including JD Vance within the Trump administration, have basically backtracked and said that he was in fact a violent gang member and that it is actually good that they deported him. So the Trump administration can't really seem to get their story straight. This rose up to the level of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration needs to, and I quote, facilitate his return. You would think that the Trump administration, where President Trump had a meeting in the Oval Office with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele just last week, you would think that they would be able to work the sort of diplomatic connections that they have and be able to get this man back. But so far, they've played dumb. They've been throwing up their hands and saying they can't really do anything even though the Supreme Court has ordered them to do so.

Glenn, why does this case disturb you so?

Glenn Greenwald: Well, I think there's always the issue of the character of the person in question and it really shouldn't matter one way or the other. There are no perfect victims, there are no perfect criminals and everybody is entitled to due process, the rule of law matters whether it's a saint or whether it's a sociopath. It really makes no difference. I do think it's worth noting that Abrego Garcia has been in the country since 2012 and he has never been convicted of a crime since then.

He was arrested for suspicion of being in the country illegally, part of an MS-13 gang, but there was no evidence of that, there was no proof for it. There was a record that recently emerged about a domestic abuse situation with his wife, who is now standing by him. You know, very typical things, but in general, he's been in the country for 13 years. There's no major infractions, there's no major charges of any kind. But let's say that, you know, he is a really a terrible criminal that he—there's a lot of evidence to suggest that he is part of a gang even though there isn't. We live in a country where the Constitution is supreme and then we have the rule of law as interpreted by courts that have a lot of checks on them.

The only people who get onto the court are people selected by the president and then confirmed by the US Senate. They're all subject to impeachment. They have all sorts of limitations on their powers, but at the end of the day, they're the ones who decide what the limits of the Constitution are.

It's been that way in our country for 200 years. And in the case of Abrego Garcia, there was a hold court a deportation court had ordered that he not be removed pending further investigation in part because of his record of having been in the country, of having supported his American wife, of having been a seemingly good citizen for there being a lot of doubts about whether he was a gang member at all. And despite this hold, meaning a court had ordered the government not to remove him, the Trump administration nonetheless removed him anyway. And as you said, when they did so, they admitted they did so by accident, that ICE agents never should have picked him up because there was a court order mandating they not do so. And I think what is so important here is that when this case entered the judiciary, and by this point, they shipped him to El Salvador.

He's now in this Salvadoran prison, and we can get into exactly what this prison is, but basically, it's one of the worst human rights-abusing prisons in the world. It's intended to exploit people for slave labor, to strip them of their humanity, to deny all due process. People who go there have no access to lawyers or courts. It's basically the most antithetical to American values, prison system you can possibly imagine, which is one of the reasons the government wants to our government wants to send them there. The case entered the judiciary and made its way up to the Supreme Court and it was a 9 to 0 ruling.

You know, we keep hearing these claims from Trump supporters that these were all left-wing judges. It was a 9 to 0 ruling, which means that people like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch, all the right-wing's favorite judges, signed on to an opinion that not only said that it was improper for them to have removed him and and sent him to El Salvador, they said the removal was illegal. That was the word they used. And they said even the government acknowledges that his removal was illegal. They then said that because of this illegal removal, we can't force the government to get him back because maybe the Salvadorans really will say, we're not giving him back unless you invade our country and we can't order the executive to go invade a country if that's the only way to get him back.

So, in theory, we can't force the Trump administration to get him back, but they have to do everything they can to facilitate his release from that prison. And then not only that, not only do they have to do everything to facilitate his release from prison, they have to then demonstrate to the court, report to the court what it is that they actually did. And we watched Trump at the White House with Bukele where they both mocked the judiciary and both essentially said, of course we're not going to try and take any steps to get him out of an Salvadoran prison. Bukele said, even if I wanted to, I couldn't because I'm not going to smuggle him into the United States. But the whole point is the Supreme Court said the Trump administration is supposed to facilitate his return back. Welcome him back, allow Bukele to send him back. And the realpolitik here is that El Salvador is a little country. Bukele's national strategy is to tie himself to the United States, make himself as subservient as possible to Trump. We're paying for each one of these people to be imprisoned.

Obviously, if we tell Bukele we want him back, then he would come back. And I understand that Trump ran on a platform of deporting people who were in the country illegally. That is a mandate democratically that he earned. Polls show that they also want that, but that doesn't mean that you can just ignore the Constitution, violate court orders, even ignore the Supreme Court in order to achieve any of those goals. And that's exactly what's being done in this case.

Zach Weissmueller: And we have a little bit of  sound of that meeting between Bukele and Trump last week. And I wanted to play a portion of that exchange that you just referenced, Glenn, I want you to analyze exactly the argument that Bukele is making as to why he cannot return, this prisoner to the United States. Could we roll that, John?

[RECORDING BEGINS]

Reporter: President Bukele, do you plan to ask President Bukele to help return the man who your administration says was mistakenly deported? The man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador?

Stephen Miller: The ruling solely stated that if this individual…

[RECORDING STOPS]

Zach Weissmueller: We're going to hear at the top here, by the way, from Stephen Miller. And then he'll kick it to Bukele.

[RECORDING BEGINS]

Stephen Miller: At El Salvador's sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador. That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about per the court can only be directed to him.

Reporter: President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return him?

Nayib Bukele: Well, I get I'm supposed that suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle? How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States or what do I do? Of course, I'm not going to do it. It's like let me the the the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?

[RECORDING STOPS]

Zach Weissmueller: Okay, you've called that claim basically laughable. Why?

Glenn Greenwald: Well, there's so many parts of that are worth commenting on. I think, first of all, Trump doesn't read Supreme Court cases and I believe him when he said he didn't really know what he was being asked about, which Supreme Court case he was being asked about, which case in particular that the question was about. So he asked Stephen Miller and Stephen Miller lied directly to Donald Trump in front of everybody by saying, oh, the court decided by a 9 to zero ruling in our favor saying that we don't have to return him, that the court will not require us to return him. That we won. We have the right to send him there, which is exactly the opposite of what the court said.

On top of that, Bukele saying, look, I can't release him because in order for me to send him back to the United States, I would have to smuggle him back into the country, meaning that the United States is prohibiting him from bringing him back when of course, the whole point of the ruling is that the United States has to allow him in. In fact, the United States would go send a plane to pick him up if it wants to be in accordance with the ruling.

But I think the much broader point here, and this is what I think is worth kind of putting a top as a framework, all of the discussions of these individual cases is it reminds me so much of the central abuse of the war on terror. If you guys—you know, I don't know if if you're too young to have lived through that or to have remembered it. I'm too young to have lived through it. So I only know this through history books, but, um, you know, one of the the basic theory of the Bush and Cheney administration as part of the war on terror that the Obama administration then adopted and even expanded is that because we were in a war, even though it didn't resemble any traditional war in any way. We weren't fighting countries on a battlefield. We were killing people in their homes, in their cars, people who weren't wearing uniforms, that essentially the executive branch had the power to do whatever it wanted as long as it labeled somebody a terrorist. It could throw somebody into prison for life, as it did in Guantanamo without any trial, without any habeas corpus hearing, without any evidence presented, without any opportunity for the person to dispute the allegations.

We could kidnap them off the streets of Europe and send them to Egypt and Syria to be tortured. We could put them in CIA black sites. The whole we could spy on Americans without the warrants required by law. And so many times, and I remember this well, when someone like myself or somebody else would object and say, well, wait a minute, how can we imprison people for life without any kind of hearing, without any evidence presented, based solely on the say so of the government. People like me would be told, why are you defending terrorists? These are terrorists. We're not going to let terrorists out of Guantanamo. And then you would say, you'd feel like you're crazy. You would say, no, the whole point is you don't actually know that they're terrorists until the government presents evidence demonstrating that they actually belong to a terrorist organization.

And it was in 2008 when the US Supreme Court decided in the case of Boumediene that the detainees in Guantanamo, even though they were non-citizens, because they were under the control of the United States in sovereign US territory, which is what the Supreme Court said Guantanamo was, have the right under the Constitution to a Habeas Corpus hearing, to at least go into court one time and contest the charges. And as it turned out, even though we were assured for eight years, oh, don't worry, the people in Guantanamo, they don't need trials. These are not just terrorists, these are the worst of the worst. So many of them, once they finally got into a court, were able to prove that the government's claims were baseless, that a lot of times it was mistaken identity. Sometimes there were rewards that people vindictively collected by reporting somebody else who had nothing to do with terrorism, but being part of a—and that's why Guantanamo is virtually empty. from a thousand people that it once had to about 30 that were left because most of them were not actually guilty of anything. That's the reason why we have Habeas Corpus and due process is because governments, even the best-intentioned ones, will often get things wrong.

And the ideal of the American founding, as expressed by Benjamin Franklin, was we'd rather have, you know, 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person wrongly imprisoned. This is the foundation of the Bill of Rights. The whole Bill of Rights is imbued with these sorts of values that are now being violated. So you see exactly the same thing happening. Bukele says, I'm not going to release a terrorist back into our streets, but the whole point is there's been no evidence evidentiary hearing, there's been no requirement of evidence presented against Abrego Garcia that he is in fact part of MS-13.

And I guess the last point I just want to make is the whole you see this kind of extreme abuse of the word terrorist. I mean, terrorist was always a vague term, but at least it kind of meant the use of political violence or threat of political violence towards civilians for political change. People who are part of a drug gang are not remotely within that definition. They're not trying to achieve political change. They're there for profit. But we just throw this word around terrorist now and the minute you do, the whole conversation ends for so many people like, he's a terrorist, he's a member of a drug gang. Why are you defending him? And this is coming from a lot of conservatives who have long claimed to venerate the Constitution, to want to preserve American values. American values means we don't have a king, we have checks and balances, we have due process before people can be punished.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, to your point about how many people who were detained in Guantanamo Bay, for example, hadn't actually done the crimes or weren't actually proven of the crimes that the US government alleged. I mean, this reminds me of the New York Times, which as much shit as I have given them very publicly over pretty much my entire journalistic career, has actually been doing an incredible journalistic investigation into the 238 people who were deported to or Venezuelans claimed to be Tren de Aragua members who were deported to El Salvador's CECOT a few weeks ago. And this, you know, this case, these flights were central to a legal battle that played out and a lot of tension between Judge Boasberg and Donald Trump.

But it's interesting because The New York Times basically said, okay, you know, we have 238 people who were deported. Basically the Trump administration claimed wheels up, they're, you know, out of US territory right as an order was being handed down from, I believe it was a district court saying, no, actually, they haven't received sufficient due process and you can't actually deport them. And the Trump administration basically said flights already in the air.

But of these 238 men, basically 32 of the men sent to El Salvador have faced serious criminal accusations or convictions in the United States or abroad. Um, these reporters also cross-checked the records of a whole bunch of countries all over Latin America. Um, you know, there's one person with a homicide conviction in Venezuela, for example. There are some people who have done legitimately heinous crimes. There were two dozen of these men who are locked up who have only been convicted of much lower-level offenses in the United States.

You know, some of the men have issues with speeding in school zones or private property trespassing or driving an improperly registered vehicle. And still many, many, many dozens of others on this flight have no criminal offenses in the United States or elsewhere at all. So, it's very frustrating to me how so many people are painting with such broad strokes acting as if we can deem all of these people to be violent criminals, violent gang members, violent terrorists, when actually splitting hairs is very important because we are talking about people's fates here. But also, I really think we do a huge disservice to actual crime and actual victims of violent crime when we act like there's MS-13 members lurking in plain sight, hiding absolutely everywhere. And I find it to be profoundly disrespectful of the Trump administration and a lot of the Maga right to call people MS-13 who actually aren't. I want actual MS-13 members to be convicted of awful crimes and to be far away from, you know, myself and my family. But I don't want a bunch of other people swept up in that drag net. How would you make the case to people that actually splitting hairs is super important?

Glenn Greenwald: Well, first of all, there is a non-trivial group of people who are part of the maga movement who don't think that it's important to split hairs. In other words, I've been hearing from a lot of them and I don't mean just like random people on Twitter. I mean like a lot of senior officials in the Trump administration and pundits and journalists and the like and what, you know, one of the things that I've seen over the course of a lot of time doing work in civil liberties and the like is that once you demonize a certain group of people, you strip them of their humanity and people no longer care what happens to them without getting into the whole like merits of the war in Israel and Gaza and the like. You know, once you strip the people of Gaza of their humanity and you say, oh, these are all Hamas members, people stop caring.

They say, 'oh, we just heard about 47 people \ who died, but, you know, they're Hamas supporters and we don't really care.' That's what happened during the war on terror, that there was an attempt to sort of say with any kind of Muslims, especially ones who are critical of the United States, these are probably terrorists and so we don't care if they get sent to any place on earth and get tortured.

I heard it and watched it happen for many years as part of the work that I was doing then. And I think there is a sense that a lot of people have been convinced of that the United States is overrun as part of an invasion by 20 million basically brown people from principally from Central and South America, but also from Africa and from other parts of the world, but principally from Central and South America, and that these are essentially enemies of the United States because they're part of an invasion that's destroying the United States. And I think it's very notable that Trump as part of his effort to deport whoever he wants with as few guard rails and constraints as possible has invoked the alien enemy Act, which as I'm sure you guys know has only been invoked three times previously in US history, the war of 1812, World War I and World War II, real wars where the United States is actually at war with with foreign nations.

And the premise of doing that is to say that having these hordes of people pouring into the United States is very similar to having say Nazi Germany invade the United States or having France or some foreign army invade the United States, which entitles the president to do everything with far fewer constraints than normal to just order people removed on the grounds that they're enemies. And so when you have this constant rhetoric that our enemies are not people who come to the United States and rape and murder, which is a very small percentage of immigrants who come to the United States, including ones who enter illegally, but instead sort of just everybody in the United States who is not a born in the United States, who is not a citizen of the United States, who comes from the countries that we've a lot of people have been convinced send only the worst of the worst, it is almost impossible to convince people to care because their humanity has been stripped away as a result of this rhetoric.

Now, I do think that doesn't necessarily represent, I can't say if it represent the majority of say self-identified MAGA supporters or not. But I do think that and growing up in the United States, being educated in the United States, I think we are all imbued with the sense that before the government can punish us, it does have to present evidence that we've actually done something that merits that punishment. It's one of the things we're all taught distinguishes our country from most others. And I think that there is starting to to to to appear now this sort of backlash, this idea that yeah, we do want people who are in our country illegally, removed. We especially want the ones who are violent and criminal and menacing and threatening removed, but we don't want to empower the president to just throw people into dungeons all over the world based solely on his say so.

Zach Weissmueller: The fact that it's all being done under this national security, these national security auspices is so concerning to me and not only me, I mean, there's this this remarkable opinion from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals authored by, as I understand a Reagan appointee. So not some bleeding heart, you know, San Francisco justice or something. Um, and what they write here is that if today the executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home. And what assurance shall there be that the executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? I mean, I want that to be just like a hysterical left-wing judge writing that, but it when you look at the situation, it's hard not to see it that way when the word terrorist, as you described Glenn, is an inherently political word. And the how is the Trump administration going to imbue that word, what what kind of meaning is it going to imbue that word with? Are they really going to stop at the line of US citizenship when they've already crossed so many other lines? Um, and it's not even a it's not some abstract concern either. Like in this very meeting with Bukele on the hot mic, Trump basically admits that they want to go after people born in the United States. We I think we have that clip too. Could you roll that John?

[RECORDING PLAYS]

Donald Trump: I said homegrown is the next. The homegrown. So you got to build about five more places. Yeah. All right.

[RECORDING ENDS]

Zach Weissmueller: What is stopping the administration at this point from deporting American citizens? Like how worried are you that we like how worried are you that we should be concerned about the deportation of political enemies?

Glenn Greenwald: Yeah, just one word about that judge. He's not just some like random judge appointed in the 1980s. This is Harvie Wilkinson, who has long been considered kind of the model of a great right-wing conservative judge that they've always wanted more Harvie Wilkinsons on the bench and specifically he was known for and is known for a very robust defense of executive power. He kind of sees Article II powers as being very, very broad, probably far broader than most other judges anywhere in the judiciary. And so I think it was very notable and I'm sure it's the reason why he ended up writing that opinion because the other part of that opinion was, okay, you say Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

Like, maybe he is. You know, I don't know. I don't know either. Like maybe he is and maybe not, but if it's so clear and the evidence is so dispositive, all you have to do is show it in a in a court hearing and you'll win and he'll be deported to to a prison, which is, you know, I think the whole point. As for the issue of whether this will extend to citizenships, you know, a lot of times these slippery slope arguments become unpersuasive to people, they sort of say, yeah, like when that happens I'll start worrying. But as you say, this is not really speculative. First of all, in the war on terror, everything I was just describing, the very first case, when the war when 9/11 happened, when when the war on terror began, I wasn't a journalist. I was a constitutional lawyer. I was working in New York. I was in Manhattan on 9/11.

So I certainly understand like how you know, traumatizing and and and the magnitude of 9/11. I don't minimize that at all. But once certain things started happening in the United States that really I thought, maybe in my naivete would never be something that the United States we would ever seen in the United States, that's when I started becoming much more kind of desiring to enter a more political realm rather than just practicing law on a constitutional level. And one of the cases that alarmed me most of all was this case of Jose Padilla. I don't know if you guys remember this, but in early 2002, so maybe just like two months, three months after the 9/11 attack, John Ashcroft gave this hastily arranged news conference in Moscow and he claimed that the United States had detected and arrested a so-called dirty bomber, somebody who had planned to import a radiological weapon into the United States to detonate something like a junior nuclear bomb inside the United States.

And as it turned out, the person they accused was an U.S.-born American citizen named Jose Padilla. And he was arrested on U.S. soil in Chicago at Chicago International Airport when he arrived into the United States and he was not charged with any crimes. The United States the the president issued a decree declaring him an enemy combatant. He was disappeared into a military break for three and a half years with no charges, held incommunicado, no lawyers of any kind based on this theory that once the government calls you in today's parlance a terrorist, but back then an enemy combatant, you essentially lose all rights including the right to go into court and contest the accusations against you. So we've seen before how quickly this not only can, but does fill over into US citizenship.

And then I think you're exactly right to point out. It wasn't just in that clip where he was kind of whispering to Bukele because I think a lot of people know Trump very well and and sort of dismiss things he says it's kind of trolling or joking and there was, you know, you got to build by more. He reaffirmed that several times including when journalists who heard that question him about it and then in subsequent interviews over the course of the next couple days where they asked him, does that even apply to U.S. citizens? You could send people to El Salvador and Salvadoran prison who are U.S. citizens? And he said, yeah, U.S. citizens don't have any special status.

That's what the president of the United States said that yeah, of course we can send them there as well. And imagine, you know, as a US citizen, even if you're convicted of a crime, you still have a whole variety of constitutional protections, right to court, right to lawyers, you can contest what's being done to you in prison. You would lose all of that if you were in a Salvadoran prison. The very idea that this is being spoken of openly, I think is what makes this not just a speculative or theoretical or abstract concern, but one that's very concrete.

The other thing I would point out is we are of course seeing and I'm sure we're going to talk about this, the attempt to use the power of the federal government to punish people not for committing crimes, but for their political views. Huge numbers of people who are in the United States legally, green card holders, married to American citizens, people who are PhD students, full bright scholars, people who came to the United States on student visas who are here legally, who are now being arrested, many times for not even participating in a protest, for doing things like writing an op Ed in a school newspaper critical of Israel. And the US government is using the full force of the law to come down as harshly as possible on them. Mahmoud Khalil is the first example.

And he's in a prison in Louisiana, a state he had never been to. They purposely took him there hoping for a friendly judge. His American wife just gave birth to their first child two days ago and he asked for permission to be there with her in order to see the birth of his first child and within 23 minutes, ICE rejected the request in this kind of very vindictive way. I think what you're seeing both in the case of this refusal to get back Abrego Garcia, even though as you pointed out, the Trump administration originally admitted that he had been sent there mistakenly and illegally. And now in the case of Mahmoud Khalil or even these more dubious cases including that tough student who was arrested for the crime of writing an op Ed. There's like I think the idea is that the Trump administration does not want to make a concession in any single case. Like, oh yeah, this is something somebody that we sent to El Salvador erroneously, or yes, this is actually a person who's not a threat who were deporting because once they do that, it gives up the whole lie, the whole game that no, we're not infallible. That we do actually make mistakes and that's all the more reason why as the 9-0 Supreme Court ruling said, before you can deport people under the alien enemies Act, you have to at least give them the chance to have judicial review.

Liz Wolfe: What exactly happens from here? Like, does the Supreme Court just let it happen if the Trump administration continues to ignore their 90 ruling that um that it needs to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia as it appears sort of hell bent on doing. I mean, I guess officials in the administration can technically be held in contempt of court, but it's not clear to me how that actually results in much of anything because Trump has shown his preference for using the pardon power to attempt to exonerate his political allies. I mean, truly. So what exactly happens? Like if if it looks like the wheels in my brain are sort of in overdrive, it's because they are. Like the Supreme Court to my mind is like the thing that we have left. This mighty, mighty bulwark against abuses by the executive and all kinds of state power abuses. So what happens if the Trump administration just gives them the middle finger?

Glenn Greenwald: I mean, that's by far the biggest and most important question. Because the reality of our government is that although we have three co-equal branches that are intended to check one another in all sorts of ways. It's kind of endless, you know, conflict for for for power that would eventually create a balance of power as the founders envisioned it. It's the executive branch with who who has all the people with the guns. Congress has a few, but not very many, as we saw on January 6th, they're not exactly an impressive force. And the Supreme Court has essentially none.

And the way our country has always functioned is that we have accepted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as the final body that interprets the outer limits of the law and the  constraints of the Constitution. And the elected branches, including the president and the executive branch have honored that voluntarily, basically. Um, you know, there's that famous apocrypha quote from Andrew Jackson, know the Supreme Court has made its ruling, now let it enforce it.

But even then, there was a kind of compromise and an understanding that if the three branches start to disregard each other's prerogatives, that the entire Republic breaks down, that the whole framework is envisioned by the founders can is no longer viable. And so I think on the one hand, Trump understands this because he was asked in the first month of his presidency, what would happen if the Supreme Court rules against him? Would he abide by a Supreme Court ruling or are there circumstances under which he would proclaim the ruling invalid and therefore violate it? He said, 'no, I would never violate a Supreme Court ruling.'

I would always, of course, abide by a Supreme Court ruling. But then on the other hand, you have a Supreme Court led by John Roberts, who is known for being very guarded about the legitimacy of the court. And I think the Supreme Court is definitely not eager to rush headlong into a confrontation with the executive branch where they are essentially saying, you are now violating our court order and you are hereby required to take the following steps because that will essentially force a constitutional crisis that any rational and sane person would want to avoid.

And I think that was why when the Supreme Court ruled on this Abrego-Garcia case, what happened was the lower court, the district court had issued this very aggressive injunction that didn't just say you have to facilitate his return, it said you have to effectuate and I forget the exact verb, but it was basically, yeah, effectuate, exactly, effectuate. You have to actually get him back.

Like it doesn't matter what you have to do, you get him back in order to comply with this order. And the Supreme Court said, look, effectuate is too strong because that might actually require the courts to interfere in what is clearly the the the the the powers of the presidency under the Constitution. Like I said, like you could force the president to sanction El Salvador, you could force the president to invade El Salvador. These are clearly things the court can order the president to do. So the Supreme Court pulled back a little bit and said, we're not going to force you to effectuate it, but we are going to force you to do everything you can to facilitate it and show us what you've done. Clearly, Trump, no, or Stephen Miller and who's ever making these decisions, stuck a huge middle finger up at the Supreme Court.

Again, even this was not a five to four ruling with Kagan, Sotomayor, Katanji Brown Jackson, Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts. This had, you know, Clarence Thomas and and Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch's signature on it as well. And the Supreme Court for its own legitimacy is going to have to say something.

You know, maybe they'll accept some very minimalist effort that the Trump administration can demonstrate that it expended just so that everybody can save face. But even if that happens in this particular case, even if there's some face saving resolution for everybody, the collision course that the Trump administration is currently on with the judiciary is inevitable because the Trump administration believes that it does not have to give due process to anybody that it wants to remove from this country for any reason. And as you said, they even believe that as long as they get you out of the country, even if you're a citizen, the Supreme Court's jurisdiction over what could happen immediately comes to an end as soon as you're over international waters. And this is not a theory or a framework that the judiciary can accept without completely rendering itself, you know, a joke, just utterly neutered.

And I don't know how that's going to end. We're definitely in the middle of a very delicate situation and I think both John Roberts and the court on the one hand and the smarter people inside the Trump administration or maybe the less extremist people in the Trump administration on the other, understand that, but right now, especially when it comes to immigration, there's this almost like very religious type extremism that does not permit any limitation of any kind on what their agenda is. And I think that's what's driving so much of this. If this were any other issue, it wouldn't be quite as inflammatory, but because it's deportation and the expulsion of people who they believe shouldn't be in our country, I think they think they have an absolute democratic mandate to do anything necessary to to get them out.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, it's very frustrating advocating for due process in this case. Um, like I think all three of us are and have been because it really feels impossible to sort of get through to people on the other side. And I think I'm a little bit, I mean, it's always been a little bit of an uphill battle, but I'm really shocked by how so many people are burying their heads in the sand and acting like, you know, the fact that Abrego Garcia is entitled to his day in court for these specific proceedings, these specific allegations, you know, people are acting like that's not important. And then they're also acting like the Supreme Court's ruling is not important.

And they're also acting like the fact that the Trump administration already admitted to having made an error and can't seem to get their story straight internally. They're also acting like that's sort of beside the point. And at least I feel like, look, it very well could come out where Abrego Garcia is a bad guy, um, and where he is in fact deportable and where he is in fact MS-13 affiliated, but all I want is for that case to actually be made, um, in a much more complete and thorough manner in a court of law within the United States in order for the actual process, the actual procedure to be followed. Um, Ezra Klein basically. And if I could just interject one thing there, like, I think that point you made is so important. I mean, I think in general, if you're somebody who advocates for civil liberties, you often find

Glenn Greenwald: Yourself targeted with a sort of vitriol because it means defending the rights of people who are charged with and might very well be guilty of some of the most heinous crimes. And then there you are standing up and saying, wait a minute, you can't do that to these people. Even though they're guilty of the most heinous crimes, they're entitled to certain rights, not because you want them to have a certain kind of more delicate treatment, but because the entire system, all of our rights depends upon these rights being applied universally. Same thing with free speech. If you're the one who stands up and says, yes, this person with obviously hideous views nonetheless can't be punished for their views. They say, why are you defending a Nazi or a fascist or a racist or whatever?

These are things that happens with civil right, with civil liberties in general. I think there's one added component here though that needs to be addressed by anybody who wants to try and make this case, which is, I think there's a a sense that a lot of people have and they may not even articulate it, but it but it definitely is driving a lot of their thinking, that when they think of civil liberties, you know, they're like the first amendment or the fifth amendment right to process, the whole bill of rights, the Constitution, they think that's for citizens.

They don't think that's for people who are foreign nationals. Um, people who are in the US legally, but definitely they think it's not for people who are in the United States uh illegally. And the Supreme Court has said for 150 years and it's such an important point, that the Bill of Rights is not this package of presents that you offer to some special group of people called US citizens. It's an instrument for constraining what the US government can do with regard to any human beings under its control. And you know, it's so easy to demonstrate. I keep asking my conservative friends who deny this to imagine what would have happened say in 2020, you know, here you have Jordan Peterson, he's on US soil on a visa, but he's not a US citizen.

He criticizes the Biden administration all the time. And then Joe Biden orders the FBI to go and murder him. You know, just go and assassinate Jordan Peterson. He's criticizing our policies. He's causing instability in our country. Would there really be no constitutional constraints on Joe Biden's ability to go order Jordan Peterson murdered because as a non-citizen, Jordan Peterson has no constitutional rights in our country. Of course, everybody would instantly understand that was an abuse of constitutional limits, even though he's a non-citizen because that does apply those those rights due to to non-citizens and even though they like Jordan Peterson and they may not like Abrego Garcia, the principle has to remain the same.

Liz Wolfe: Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, you're sort of referencing earlier the Jewish lawyers defending the rights of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, the sort of famous ACLU case. Unfortunately, the ACLU has in so many ways strayed from uh their origins. But like, yeah, I mean, honestly, it's hard for me to think of anything more American than that. You know, it's not a very fun job trying to defend the rights of truly heinous people, but it's fundamentally this question of like, what is it exactly that we expect state actors uh to adhere to? And this belief that the when we have these high standards that we hold them to, when we have these high expectations, that ends up doing all of us a service uh because you

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