How The Trump Administration Plans To Expand Its Deportation Powers: Through The Supreme Court

The Trump administration has ramped up its immigration crackdown, invoking the wartime Alien Enemies Act to swiftly deport hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Experts say his plan is just now getting started.

According to a new report by Axios, President Trump has accelerated a "multi-pronged, methodically planned" strategy to push the Supreme Court to bless his power to deport more people with vastly fewer judicial restraints. His plan mainly revolves around two cases.

The first one, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was invoked over the weekend, allows the administration to deport migrants without the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge. Saturday's proclamation allowed Trump to deport 300 accused members of the gang Tren de Aragua to be taken to CECOT, El Salvador's controversial mega-prison.

The second, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, came amid the anti-communist fears of the Cold War. While it eased some race-based immigration restrictions, particularly for Asians, it effectively limited most immigration to Europeans. It also codified rules allowing ideology to be used to deny immigration and allow deportation.

Most recently the Trump administration used the act as the basis to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped organize campus protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war.

Between those two cases, the Trump administration is planning for the Supreme Court to answer several questions, and ultimately give them more power to continue their mass deportation operations, which they promised would be the largest in American history.

The questions include: Does peacetime president have the right to deport noncitizens under the war-time Alien Enemies Act— even if there's no declared war against a foreign adversary?; should a single federal judge in a district court have the power to block a president's deportation program nationwide?; Can the secretary of state's power to deport immigrants based on foreign-policy concerns extend to so many student visa holders that some colleges won't be able to admit foreign-exchange students? And more.

Another tactic that the administration could be looking to would be stripping U.S. citizenship from naturalized Americans, Axios explains.

"What's going to be on the horizon and denaturalization cases," said Mike Davis, a close White House ally and founder of the conservative Article III Project. "You're going to have Hamas supporters who have been naturalized within the last 10 years, and they are eligible to lose their status as citizens and get deported. It's worth it."

It remains to be seen how open the Supreme Court would be to rule on the immigration discourse. For one, the Court holds a conservative majority, with six of the nine members being appointed by Republicans— three by Trump.

On the other hand, the justices have separated themselves from immigration disputes. At the same time, Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public statement Tuesday, rebuking Trump and others after they called for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for his rulings aimed at delaying the deportation of the Venezuelans.

"For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose," Roberts wrote in a brief statement.