Tuesday, May 20`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 38
NY Daily News: The Homeland Security secretary flubbed a simple question about the bedrock constitutional concept at a Senate hearing on Tuesday, claiming the legal principle means a “president has to be able to remove people from this country.”
In reality, habeas requires the government to give a reason for the detention of any person, as Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-New Hampshire) noted in response to Noem
“Habeas corpus is the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people,” Hassan said. “If not for that protection, the government could simply arrest people, including American citizens, and hold them indefinitely for no reason.”
The Trump administration has threatened to seek to suspend habeas to give law enforcement more of a free hand to carry out his threats to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
“I support habeas corpus — I also recognize that the president of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not,” Noem told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
Stephen Miller, the hardline Trump aide, has floated the novel theory that illegal immigration amounts to a hostile invasion and therefore the nation is at war, potentially permitting habeas and other rights to be suspended.
Legal analysts warn that such a move would deprive all Americans of their basic rights, not just undocumented immigrants.
Habeas has only been suspended four times in American history, all during actual wars and with congressional approval. Even when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the right at the start of the Civil War, courts required him to obtain the consent of Congress.
