Karoline Leavitt primed unthinkable action after Sonia Sotomayor's warning: analyst

MSNBC’S Jordan Rubin delivered a message to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt after she floated the startling suggestion that the U.S. government could potentially deport American citizens who are “violent” repeat offenders “if it’s legal.”

“It’s not,” the legal analyst Rubin clapped back. “But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”

Rubin on Wednesday flagged Leavitt’s comments she made at a daily news briefing this week for readers of his MSNBC legal blog – which the former prosecutor said were forewarned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor just a day earlier.

“Dissenting from the Supreme Court’s decision to grant emergency relief to the government in a case about deportations, Sotomayor wrote that the implications of the Trump administration’s legal stance is that ‘not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes, and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal,”' according to Rubin.

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The possibility floated by Leavitt could meet reality in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father who the Trump administration mistakenly sent to an El Salvadoran mega-prison last month, Rubin added Wednesday. That legal battle is currently pending before the high court, the MSNBC analyst said.

“Leavitt’s comments thus reinforce the importance of the court’s forthcoming decision in Abrego Garcia’s case, whose consequences could inform just how far this administration will go,” Rubin concluded.