Steve Bannon Straight Up Calls for Trump to ‘Suspend the Writ of Habeas Corpus’ After Latest Court Rulings

Screenshot via WarRoom

Former Trump White House advisor turned MAGA podcaster, Steve Bannon, straight up called for President Donald Trump to suspend the writ of habeas corpus on Thursday, in response to recent court rulings striking down his tariffs and use of emergency powers to deport migrants without due process.

“So you’ve got that,” Bannon concluded after accusing judges of executing a “judicial insurrection” and adding, “You’ve got the courts on him being commander-in-chief and deporting the 13 million illegal alien invaders. The courts are saying there, and I say, hey, on the first, suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Suspend it. Do what Lincoln did. And Lincoln had a harder argument, ladies and gentlemen.”

The Constitution says habeas corpus “shall not be suspended, unless when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it” — and it has only happened inside the U.S. during the Civil War and World War II.

Bannon and guests have brought up the idea of Trump suspending habeas corpus more and more in recent weeks, beginning with a late-April conversation between him and Rogan O’Handley – who goes by the moniker “DC Draino.”

“What do you do when your own intelligence apparatus around the president is trying to undercut him so he has no standing in the court when he does exactly what you say he has to do, which is suspend habeas corpus (the right to due process) and start rolling them out of here, brother?” Bannon asked O’Handley on his WarRoom program at the time.

“Well, is that the same deep state that indicted him four times? We don’t care what they say, okay? We have common sense. We watched our country be invaded for four years by 10 to 15 million illegal aliens. Many of them. Men of fighting age, okay?” O’Handley replied, adding:

And when I say suspend the writ, not only is this a constitutional power in Article 1, Section 9, but we’re not even suspending it for American citizens, okay, there’s none of that. These are illegal aliens, they do not have a right to be here, they get deported. If the courts want to stop us, we go around the courts by using constitutional authority to do so.

A few weeks later, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller told reporters that the Trump administration was actively looking at suspending habeas corpus, depending “on whether the courts do the right thing.”

“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. So, I would say that’s an option we’re actively looking at,” Miller said following a federal ruling that found the U.S. was not currently under an invasion.

In early May, Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., shot down the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants without any kind of due process.

Rodriguez’s ruling added that the administration using the 18th-century wartime law would “strip the courts of their traditional role of interpreting Congressional statutes to determine whether a government official has exceeded the statute’s scope. The law does not support such a position.”

The judge took issue with Trump claiming that gang members illegally entering the United States constitutes a “predatory incursion,” the standard set in the AEA for its use.

“In the significant majority of the records, the use of ‘invasion’ and ‘predatory incursion’ referred to an attack by military forces,” Judge Rodriguez noted, and argued such an attack would “involve an organized, armed force entering the United States to engage in conduct destructive of property and human life in a specific geographical area.”