White House floats deporting U.S. citizens. Justice Sotomayor just warned about that.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned potentially deporting American citizens who are violent repeat offenders “if it’s legal.”

Responding to a question at Tuesday’s daily briefing, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mentioned President Donald Trump’s “idea” to potentially deport “violent” and “heinous” U.S. citizens, adding a seemingly important caveat: “If it’s legal.”

It’s not.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Indeed, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned just a day earlier of the possibility.

Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision to grant emergency relief to the government in a case about deportations, Sotomayor wrote that the implications of the Trump administration’s legal stance is that “not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal.”

The possibility also lurks in another appeal pending before the justices, in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was erroneously deported to El Salvador. Despite conceding an “administrative error” in sending him to that country, the government has resisted remedying the error. Supporting his return, constitutional scholars wrote to the high court that, if the government’s position were correct, then “the Executive Branch would possess a shuddering degree of power — power that the President could wield in extreme and extraordinary ways, including against American citizens that the President simply disfavors.”

Leavitt’s comments thus reinforce the importance of the court’s forthcoming decision in Abrego Garcia’s case, whose consequences could inform just how far this administration will go.