1. United States
2. Fla.
3. Letter

Trump needs to go. No where does the constitution grant the president the right to suspend rights. To consider doing so is an affront to the citizens of the U.S. Last spring, Will Scharf, an arch-conservative lawyer serving as the White House staff secretary, wrote a secret memo to the chief of staff that reflected growing unease in the West Wing about one of the extreme measures being weighed by Stephen Miller, the powerful adviser driving President Trump’s deportation campaign. Dated April 29, 2025, and stamped “confidential,” the memo (https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/2afc51a03e41c257/7f0f0dff-full.pdf) was careful and lawyerly but amounted to a warning against end-running the rule of law. The subject line read: “THE WRIT OF HABEAS CORPUS.” Habeas corpus (https://www.nytimes.com/article/what-is-habeas-corpus-trump.html) — the centuries-old right to force the government to justify, before a judge, why it has locked a person up — is enshrined in Article I of the Constitution. Mr. Scharf’s memo, in its unassuming way, was a blinking red warning light. The second Trump White House was deliberating an explosive new claim of presidential power: the suspension of habeas rights for unauthorized immigrants.