Trump ‘Wants This Fight’: Maggie Haberman Says White House Is Relishing Deportation Cases

CNN’s Maggie Haberman said the Trump administration wants to keep fighting over the fate of a Salvadoran immigrant who is incarcerated in the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador.

Last month, Abrego Garcia was arrested in Baltimore and deported to El Salvador. The Trump administration alleges he is a member of the MS-13 gang, though he has no criminal record. In 2019, an immigration judge ruled that Abrego Garcia could not be deported to El Salvador because of credible death threats. The Trump administration deported him there anyway, and without due process.

The U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld a lower court ruling that ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., which is paying the Salvadoran government to imprison him and hundreds of others. Those hundreds of others are currently the subjects of a separate case in which a federal judge found “probable cause” to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for defying his order to turn planes carrying the deportees around and bring them back to the U.S.

“What is your sense of what’s happening behind the scenes White House?” Kaitlan Collins asked on Wednesday’s edition of The Source on CNN.

“Well, they’re ready to see what the judges do and they are going to come to court,” Haberman replied. “And I think they are going to take the same minimalist approach that we have seen… But the general feeling in the administration is they have better odds than not with the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court generally is not going to want to dictate – the conservative justices – are not going to want to try to look like they are dictating how the U.S. handles some aspect of immigration enforcement or foreign policy.”

She went on to conclude, “[T]his administration wants this fight. You saw that today. You have seen that every day that they talk about immigration. They think that the court of public opinion is generally on their side. And they would certainly rather be talking about this than talking about tariffs or talking about economic confidence decreasing.”

Watch above via CNN.