The Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling demanding federal authorities “facilitate” the return of a mistakenly deported Maryland man marks a serious “rebuke” of the Trump administration, former federal prosecutor Jeffrey Toobin says.
In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, the former assistant U.S. Attorney said the court’s order in favor of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was a check on Trump.
“I think it's just worth pausing to recognize this was an extraordinary unanimous rebuke of the Trump administration,” Toobin said, highlighting the finger-wagging from the court’s six conservatives especially.
Still, the court’s conservatives appeared to throw Trump a lifeline, scaling back a lower district court’s order to “effectuate” his release. Toobin worried that the instructions to “facilitate” Garcia Abrego’s return alone could leave Abrego Garcia in limbo.
“But what does that mean in the in the real world? The Trump administration has already said, ‘Mr. Garcia is in the custody of El Salvador. We have no control over prisons in El Salvador so we can't get him back,’” Toobin said, adding that, given the Trump administration’s relationship with the country, “it seems like this is something that they could facilitate if they wanted.”
The ex-prosecutor and legal analyst said the question of what levers the courts can pull to make sure the government does facilitate his release remains open under the order.
“The question is how hard will the Trump administration try to get Mr. Garcia back, if at all?” Toobin said.
But the court’s ruling alone marks a broader split between Trump and the high court, despite its reluctance to rule against him so far.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, installed by Trump on the high court just weeks before his 2020 election defeat, has become a lightning rod for far-right fury after joining the liberal minority to dissent against a ruling temporarily green-lighting Trump’s use of the 1789 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to the El Salvadorian camp.
Trump advisor and billionaire Elon Musk blasted the justice’s “suicidal empathy” in response to the ruling in a Monday X post.
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