Brit Hume weighed in on Fox News Monday about the Supreme Court’s decision involving a deported man who was allegedly an MS-13 gang member.
The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to work toward returning alleged MS-13 member Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, despite jurisdictional limits and a lapsed lower court deadline. During an appearance on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” Hume explained why he thinks the Supreme Court went “as far as it could” to return him.
“It’s a bit of a gray area, Bret. The ruling by the Supreme Court said the administration should facilitate his return, [but it] didn’t say [it] should effectuate it or bring it about,” Hume told Baier.
Hume said that distinction points out the limitations of the Supreme Court’s power, especially concerning foreign policy and international relations.
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“There are obvious reasons for that, the principle one being that he’s now in the custody of another government of the sovereign country of El Salvador, of which he’s a citizen, and the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction doesn’t apply there,” Hume said. “So all it can do is tell the administration to try to bring him back, but it can’t go much beyond that because you’re dealing here with foreign policy issues and with foreign relations, and the Supreme Court really has almost no, if any, jurisdiction over that. So what the Supreme Court did was to go about it as far as I think it could.”
With the Salvadoran president visiting the White House on the same day, questions arose concerning whether the Trump administration has made a formal request for the man’s release. Hume said the Salvadoran leader made it clear he does not intend to release the individual.
“Now the question is bound to be asked at this hearing tomorrow if the administration actually made a formal request to El Salvador to bring this man back to this country, or at least to take him out of El Salvador, and I don’t know what the answer to that is going to be, but the El Salvadoran president was pretty strong in the Oval Office today in saying that he wasn’t about to release this man from custody in El Salvador,” Hume added. “So this may turn out to be something that was done by this administration in error sending him there, which it has admitted, but it may now be beyond the reach of the courts.”
The Trump administration contends it has no obligation to return Abrego Garcia, a suspected MS-13 member, after his deportation to El Salvador. In court filings, the Department of Justice said that federal courts lack the authority to interfere in foreign policy decisions, especially regarding Garcia’s repatriation and detention in El Salvador’s mega-prison.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Garcia in March and deported him to El Salvador, where authorities placed him in the country’s mega-prison for gang members. Garcia, who illegally entered the U.S. in 2011, was first flagged as an MS-13 associate after a 2019 arrest in Maryland and a tip from an informant.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screenshot/Fox News)
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