A senior White House lawyer warned that suspending habeas corpus protections for illegal immigrants would likely trigger a major constitutional battle, cautioning President Donald Trump against taking up a strategy once used during the Civil War era under President Abraham Lincoln.Two sets of memoranda obtained by New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman revealed that White House staff secretary Will Scharf addressed a pair of more drastic policy proposals floated by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, in May 2025. The memos, sent to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, offered a rare glimpse into internal administration debates over the limits of executive power as Trump’s team pursued a concentrated immigration enforcement agenda. The New York Times published excerpts from the reporters’ forthcoming book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.One memorandum, dated April 29, 2025, addressed the constitutional writ of habeas corpus, the legal mechanism that allows detainees to challenge the legality of their confinement before a judge.
“The Writ of Habeas Corpus is a legal mechanism to challenge unjust confinement, detention, or punishment,” Scharf wrote. “It prevents, in effect, governmental actors from detaining, imprisoning, or executing individuals arbitrarily.”
