3 weeks Ago
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled last week that the Trump administration improperly deported a Maryland man and ordered he be brought back to the United States. President Donald Trump is refusing to comply. Some members of Congress were quick to criticize the president’s defiance of the courts.
“This is not America,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement Monday . “The Supreme Court must aggressively enforce its order immediately.” But Utah’s federal representatives have been largely silent on the issue.
None of the six members of Utah’s all-Republican congressional delegation — which includes Sens. Mike Lee and John Curtis, and Reps. Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy and Burgess Owens — responded to requests for comment on the ruling, and only Lee has addressed the illegal deportation on social media.
The court decision came down last Thursday. In it, all nine justices agreed with a lower court’s orders that the U.S.
must facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was deported last month to El Salvador, despite a 2019 ruling that prevented his deportation out of concerns for his safety. Writing for the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she agrees with the district court that “the proper remedy is to provide Abrego Garcia with all the process to which he would have been entitled had he not been unlawfully removed to El Salvador. That means the Government must comply with its obligation to provide Abrego Garcia with ‘due process of law,’ including notice and an opportunity to be heard, in any future proceedings.
” During an Oval Office meeting Monday , El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said he would not return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., saying, Politico reported, “How can I return him to the United States? Am I going to smuggle him? Of course I’m not going to do it.
” There, Secretary of State Marco Rubio also responded to questions about the ruling by arguing that “no court in the United States has the right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,” while Attorney General Pam Bondi said that bringing Abrego Garcia back to the U.S. was “not up to us.
” She added, however, “If they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.” On the social media platform X, Lee shared a story Monday about the Oval Office meeting and wrote simply, in quotes, “‘Wrongly deported.’” In another post , Lee, who has long been considered a possible SCOTUS pick for Trump, shared video of Bukele’s comments and wrote, “Thank you, @nayibbukele, for working to make the world a safer place.
” His office did not respond to a request for further comment on the administration’s refusal to comply with the court order. During Monday’s meeting at the White House, Trump also threatened to deport American citizens to El Salvador. “The homegrowns are next,” he told Bukele .
“You gotta build about five more places. ..
. It’s not big enough.” It was not the first time Trump has suggested imprisoning U.
S. citizens in El Salvador. “I look forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla,” the president wrote on the social media platform Truth Social last month following news of Tesla dealerships being protested and vandalized.
“Perhaps they could serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions!” (Eric Lee | The New York Times) President Donald Trump speaks while he meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, on Monday, April 14, 2025. President Trump met with President Bukele as the administration ramps up its use of a notorious Salvadoran prison for holding migrants deported by the U.S.
None of the members of Utah’s congressional delegation responded to requests for comment on Trump’s threat Monday to imprison U.S. citizens overseas, though Lee did say Friday that to suggest the Trump administration wants to deport U.
S. citizens was “false and defamatory.” The Abrego Garcia ruling and Oval Office meeting came after another immigration-related SCOTUS decision last week .
For separate reasons, both the Trump administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the parties to the suit, celebrated the decision. In a 5-4 ruling, SCOTUS vacated a lower court’s order halting the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act — a decision the Trump administration and its allies liked — but still held that under the law, migrants have a right to due process before being deported, a victory for the petitioners. The ruling did not address the constitutionality of the law, but following the decision, Trump advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X , “ALIEN ENEMIES ACT NOW IN FULL EFFECT.
THE FOREIGN TERRORISTS WILL BE ARRESTED AND EXPELLED.” And while, again, all six members of Utah’s congressional delegation did not respond to requests for comment on the ruling and the Trump administration’s victory lap, Lee and Owens echoed Miller’s framing of the case on social media. “The Democrats and mainstream media shouted ‘constitutional crisis’ while rogue judges blocked the President of the United States from deporting violent TDA members,” Owens wrote on X , referring to the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua, against which Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act last month .
Lee, meanwhile, has posted more than half a dozen times about the ruling in recent days, including calling it “ disappointing ” that Justice Amy Coney Barrett broke with the conservative majority on the court and sided with part of the dissenting opinion in the case. On Monday, Miller doubled down on the administration’s strategy and told reporters that they plan to continue to “send foreign terrorist aliens” to El Salvador. Lee shared a video of the comments and wrote, “So many to deport.
So little time. Keep it up, @StephenM!”.
