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The Trump administration is considering suspending the constitutional right of habeas corpus in an effort to speed up the removal of individuals it claims are in the country illegally, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Friday.
Speaking to reporters, Miller cited the Constitution’s allowance for the suspension of habeas corpus “in cases of rebellion or invasion,” arguing that the current state of unauthorized immigration could justify such a move.
“Well, the Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said. “So it’s an option we’re actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
The writ of habeas corpus — a legal principle dating back centuries — requires the government to justify the detention of any individual before a judge. Its suspension would mark a historic break from longstanding legal norms, especially in the context of immigration enforcement.
President Trump has repeatedly criticized the court system for slowing the deportation process, saying in April that giving trials to all undocumented immigrants would take “200 years.” His administration has faced numerous lawsuits for detaining and deporting migrants, including controversial transfers to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a rarely invoked law historically used during wartime.
While Trump administration attorneys have argued that mass unauthorized immigration constitutes an “invasion,” judges across multiple jurisdictions have questioned the legal validity of applying wartime powers to civilian immigration matters.
The writ of habeas corpus has only been suspended a few times in U.S. history — during the Civil War, parts of the Reconstruction Era, the Philippine insurrection of 1905, and after Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. It has never been suspended in the continental U.S. for immigration control.
Legal scholars and civil rights advocates warn that such a move would spark immediate constitutional challenges and risk setting a dangerous precedent. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called the idea “a staggering abuse of executive power.”
Miller declined to give a timeline or criteria for how the administration might determine when habeas corpus could be suspended.
