The Trump administration, CNN reports, is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, depending on “whether the courts do the right thing or not.” Those quoted phrases are from Trump aide Stephen Miller, according to whom the “right thing” consists of letting Donald Trump do whatever Donald Trump wants to do, regardless of whether what he wants to do is, you know, legal.

The Latin phrase habeas corpus means “you shall have the body.” What it boils down to is that if you are arrested, a judge can require your captors to bring you (that’s the body part) to court where you can argue that your arrest is not legally justified (and your captors can argue that it is).

It’s a legal principle we inherited from England that dates to “time immemorial” — that is, before the beginning of of Richard I’s kingship in 1189 — originating in the 1166 Assize of Clarendon, and it or something very like it is a basic foundational element of any legal system that respects individual rights.

Without habeas corpus, government officials can just whisk you away to prison on any charge they care enough to make up and hold you for a long time whether there’s any justification at all or not.

A hypothetical:

You’re arrested for the murder of John Smith. As it happens, John Smith is alive, not missing, indeed has been seen and recorded on video eight hours after your arrest, tucking in to an Oklahoma onion burger at Sid’s Diner in El Reno.

Without habeas corpus, your captors can keep you in jail (per the Speedy Trial Act of 1974, which codifies a constitutional provision) for up to a month before even indicting you for the murder that didn’t happen, followed by 10 days until arraigning you the murder that didn’t happen, followed by 60 days before actually taking the case to trial.

But if you file a petition for habeas corpus, you can show a judge evidence that not only is there no probable cause to believe you murdered John Smith, but that John Smith is alive and well. The judge can call BS on your arrest and free you.

That’s a good thing, and the US Constitution provides, in Article I, Section 9, that “[t]he Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Neither the US nor any portion of it is currently in rebellion.

Neither the US nor any portion of it is currently being invaded.

There’s no “emergency” imperiling the “public safety.”

There’s just Donald J. Trump throwing a tantrum over the courts following the law instead of letting him do whatever he wants to do.

Does Trump WANT a rebellion? Because suspending habeas corpus for stupid, selfish, and illegal reasons sounds like a great way to get a rebellion. He may not care about public opinion, but the ice he’s on that keeps it from drowning him is getting thinner by the moment.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

On May 5, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that immigrants in the US can use a smartphone app to claim free plane tickets and $1,000 payments if they’re willing to “self-deport.”

During her Senate confirmation hearing for the position of DHS secretary, Kristi Noem promised that “on day one, CBP One will be shut down.”

CBP One was (and is), a phone app used by immigrants to interact with US Customs and Border Protection [sic]. By “shut down,” it turns out she meant “re-named CBP Home and tilted  toward encouraging immigrant ‘self-deportation’ rather than facilitating asylum claims.”

Since changing the app’s name, the woman popularly referred to as “ICE Barbie,” and not in a flattering way, has promoted it in television commercials:

“If you are here illegally [sic] … you will be fined nearly $1,000 a day, imprisoned, and deported. You will never return. But if you register using our CBP Home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.”

So in the space of a couple of months, it’s gone from a $1,000 per day fine to $1,000 in pocket money and a free plane ticket.  What’s not to like, other than the idiotic idea that it’s a GOOD thing for productive workers to flee the United States, let alone get paid to do so?

Well, there’s this:

Who on Earth would trust the US government, Donald Trump, or Kristi Noem with their location and other information, or believe that the supposed future path to “return legally,” or even that the plane ticket and thousand bucks would actually happen?

If I’m an immigrant in the US who doesn’t possess one of those Very Special Magical Important Permission Slips to travel to, move to, or work at anywhere I please, I doubt I’d be inclined to tell Trump, Noem, CBP or ICE where to find me. They’re simply not trustworthy.

And why the sudden honey to hide the smell of the vinegar?

Well, Trump’s vaunted “mass deportation” program doesn’t seem to be going very well. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the administration is only on track to deport half its goal of one million immigrants this year (and every year after).

If anything, the early number in “mass deportation” should run well ahead of, rather than behind, future numbers. It’s “easy pickins'” right now. As time goes on, immigrants will get better, not worse, at hiding from Trump’s roving gangs of “immigration enforcement” thugs.

Of course, we’re used to presidents over-promising and under-delivering. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” program claimed to have deported 1.1 million immigrants, but the more likely number was about 300,000 — and “Operation Wetback” was accompanied by a credible, and fulfilled, promise that many of those deported would be able to return with work visas under the “Bracero” program, rather than the non-credible Trumpian “maybe” claim.

The current “mass deportation” effort is evil, ugly, and incredibly damaging to the US economy. Fortunately, it seems to be failing. So now you know why they’re offering those plane tickets and payouts.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Warren Buffett’s father should have changed Radical Son David Horowitz’s red diapers.

At first glance, Horowitz’s vehement rejection of his card-carrying Communist Party upbringing to become an equally unwavering Grand Old Party loyalist, from voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election right up until his passing on April 29, would seem the mirror opposite of the path to Buffett’s retirement a week later.  Six decades after inheriting the Berkshire Hathaway he would nurture into a trillion-dollar conglomerate from a Republican congressman deemed “arch‐conservative” in his New York Times obituary, Howard Homan Buffett’s son had become the sort of capitalist who could not only be commended by Times guest essayist Roger Lowenstein for having “long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed” (“Taking the Measure of Warren Buffett,” May 5), but gladly cited as a role model by It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism author Bernie Sanders.

Yet the Times acknowledged that the “arch-conservative” had urged “curbs … on the United States military leadership,” anticipating Dwight Eisenhower’s better-remembered caution to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.”  E. J. Dionne, Jr. observed in Why Americans Hate Politics that “New Left scholars … took a much more favorable view of the old isolationists such as Robert A. Taft” and Buffett “than liberal scholarship ever had” — and that Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby had quoted Buffett on how “we cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.”

Dionne’s caveat that “the New Left’s attack on large corporations was not a cause to which conservatives repaired” is hard to maintain when a devoted Ayn Rand fan like Roy A. Childs, Jr. could note in the May 1972 issue of Libertarian Forum not only the validity of “students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants” but that law-and-order dismissals ignored how “so-called ‘private’ universities … seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain.”

One of those “New Left scholars” was none other than David Horowitz.  The back cover of Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism includes a blurb from the Horowitz who would later coedit The Anti-Chomsky Reader lauding its “understanding of the imperial dynamics of America’s postwar course” underneath Noam Chomsky lamenting “how much has been lost by narrowing the spectrum of debate” when such a “critique of … the centralization of state power was perceptive at the time, and has much to offer to us today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “They Could Have Overruled the Empire as Father and Son” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2025