Ex-federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann sounded the alarm on Donald Trump’s deportations Monday after the president openly defied a Supreme Court and lower court order to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“It is now going to be up to the Supreme Court to actually show some steel and backbone, to find that this is in violation of their order and take as drastic steps as they can — and ideally again, unanimously — about what is happening here,” Weissmann told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace.
“Or we really won’t have a country left.”
On Monday, Trump met with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office where reporters asked about the case of Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was legally in the United States before being deported to a brutal prison in El Salvador.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, in the meeting, claimed it’s up to El Salvador “if they want to return him” and it’s “not up to us.”
“I thought this day would never come but I want to make sure people understand we are here,” Weissmann said. “At least I have tried to say we’re not yet in that constitutional crisis ― that is what is going on right now.”
He said the Trump administration is “hiding behind the sort of thinnest veneer” in saying that it “can’t possibly do anything” now that Abrego Garcia is out of the country.
“It is a complete flouting of the district court, the court of appeals and now Supreme Court orders. It is truly remarkable,” he stressed.
We Don’t Work For Billionaires. We Work For You.
Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages.
He continued, “The complicity is what makes this so, so different than Trump 1.0 that you don’t have the White House counsel, you don’t have the attorney general, you don’t have anyone to say, ‘This is not legal. It is not constitutional. It is not how you’re supposed to behave in the United States of America.’”
Trump, in the same meeting, also shared that he was “all for” sending U.S. citizens to the prison. His comments arrived less than a week after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt shared that Trump was exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens there, as well.