Slate Daily Feed

In mid-March of 2025, ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt and his colleagues started hearing that the Trump administration might attempt a flagrantly lawless publicity stunt, involving migrant men, secret flights to El Salvador, a notorious gulag, and a total disregard for due process. Despite getting word that something was about to happen, and rushing into a Saturday night hearing, and then securing a TRO from DC judge James Boasberg, Lee and his colleagues were unable to prevent more than 250 men from being renditioned from Texas to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador. The legal cases spawned by the dramatic events of March 15th 2025 haven’t gone away, indeed they are reaching crucial milestones in the courts, raising foundational questions about the abuse of statutes and what it means to defy court orders. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by the ACLU’s Lee Gelernt who is litigating these cases, to discuss the very high stakes of a set of cases that may have fallen off your radar in the shuffle.