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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 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.”.....

Inside the White House, Mr. Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff, saw an opening for an idea he had raised previously: What if Mr. Trump simply claimed the power to suspend habeas corpus?

Then the locked-up immigrants would be blocked from receiving hearings or even from seeking court orders to prevent their removal from the country. This was an opportunity for Mr. Trump not only to speed up deportations, but also to assert vastly expanded power over a legal system that was getting in his way......

Habeas corpus had been formally suspended only four times, most recently after Pearl Harbor. In every case, the country was at war or facing armed rebellion. Only Lincoln, at the start of the Civil War, had ever claimed the power without congressional authorization, and only during a long congressional recess......

Under immense public pressure, the administration would subsequently take a different course of action. The most vocal immigration hard-liner, Gregory Bovino, the Customs and Border Protection commander-at-large, was removed from his post, and the administration held back on ICE pushes in cities in the weeks after Mr. Pretti’s death.

Yet just as the idea of suspending habeas corpus was set aside but never fully abandoned by some inside the White House, the Insurrection Act, at least in the eyes of its proponents, would remain a loaded weapon in a West Wing eager to test the limits of presidential power.