Stephen Miller, the misguided immigration-obsessed Rasputin encouraging President Donald Trump's authoritarian overreaches to drive from the country people who the administration insists (but does not want to prove) are here illegally, has floated the administration's most tyrannical trial balloon yet: stabbing the very heart of what's decent in the Western legal tradition by saying the administration can and ought to eliminate the writ of habeas corpus in order to evade legal niceties preventing them from deporting as many people as they want, as fast as they want to.
As Jacob Sullum reported at Reason last week, Miller's untrue attempt to define illegal immigration as the sort of "invasion" that the Constitution does allow as an excuse to suspend the writ (though constitutional construction strongly suggests only Congress can actually do it) is prerejected by multiple federal judges, who have noted that "Trump's understanding of 'invasion or predatory incursion' is inconsistent with the law's historical context and with contemporaneous usage, including the definition of 'invasion' reflected in dictionaries, correspondence among the Founders, and the Constitution itself."
The writ of habeas corpus—in essence requiring the state to provide reasons and evidence before a court for holding someone in custody—is sensibly described commonly, as in this 1902 article in The American Historical Review as "one of the important safeguards of personal liberty, and the struggle for its possession has marked the advance of constitutional government."
