The Trump Administration Came Closer to Suspending Habeas Corpus Than Anyone Realized
The Scharf-to-Wiles memo is dated April 29, 2025. Ten days later, on May 9, Miller told reporters that suspending habeas corpus was “an option we are actively looking at.”
That sequence is the spine of new reporting from New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman in “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” published by Simon & Schuster on June 23, 2026. It expands on their June 15 New York Times article, “Frustrated by Courts, Trump Weighed Suspending a Constitutional Right.”
Swan told “Morning Joe” the idea was “far more seriously entertained than people realized at the time.” The memo, written in what Swan called “very loyal language,” laid out why crossing that line would be a mistake, and the administration ultimately did not formally suspend the right.
Swan went further in his own analysis. He said that “in a certain way” habeas rights have effectively been suspended, because thousands of immigrants are in detention without hearings, and that at the lower-court level the administration is, in his words, “not obeying all these court orders.” That is Swan’s characterization, not an established fact. The administration disputes claims that it has ignored court orders, and the underlying legal disputes are ongoing.
Swan said the picture shifts over the course of the book. He agreed that in the first 6 months courts, universities and others were “scrambling,” and that by the second half the system and the judges had “awakened” and were “on their front foot.”
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