Secret memos reveal a top White House lawyer privately warned against Stephen Miller’s push to strip migrants of their rights to challenge their detention under President Donald Trump’s nationwide immigration crackdown.
White House staff secretary Will Scharf, a Harvard-trained lawyer who once ran for office in Missouri, wrote to Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, last April to raise the alarm over Miller’s bid to suspend “habeas corpus,” arguing that any argument in favor would almost certainly collapse in court, according to an explosive new report by The New York Times.
Monday’s report is only the latest in a string of exposés on the second Trump administration by veteran political reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The White House is reportedly now in full-on meltdown mode over the revelations—which span everything from damage control efforts on the Epstein files release to Iran war planning with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s aides reportedly now suspect that highly classified discussions in the Situation Room may even have been secretly taped.
Miller’s plot represents an attack on one of the oldest principles in Anglo-American legal practice. Habeas corpus forces prosecutors to defend in court the reasons for a person’s imprisonment and to release them if the state cannot do so satisfactorily. The government has only set it aside a handful of times throughout U.S. history, always during times of war or armed revolt, with Abraham Lincoln the only president to do so without congressional approval.
Trump was, at the time of the April letter, intrigued by the possibility of suspending habeas corpus as part of his anti-immigration crusade. He quizzed aides about Lincoln’s move, made during the Civil War and while lawmakers were in recess, while Miller ordered Justice Department lawyers to study the legal precedent.
Some officials called the idea “insane,” the NYT writes. White House counsel David Warrington apparently told colleagues he doubted Miller’s grasp of the limits on executive power. Trump nevertheless continued to trumpet the move as a potential ace card in his crackdown on migrants entering the country without permission.
The president first publicly alluded to suspending habeas corpus during a Cabinet meeting held one day after Scharf submitted his memo to Wiles.
“There’s one way that’s been used by three very highly respected presidents,” he told department chiefs of how his administration might go about dealing with the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland dad who’d been wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. “But we hope we don’t have to go that route.”
Miller later told reporters that the Constitution was “clear” on provisions for suspending habeas corpus “in a time of invasion” and said that “it’s an option we are actively looking at.”
He later repeatedly cast uncontrolled immigration in those terms, and while the move did not eventually go ahead as an active suspension of the right, the Trump administration was nevertheless able to secure via other routes much of what it would have delivered anyway.
From July 2025, ICE began treating long-settled residents as if they had just been caught at the border, cutting off hearings for release on bond for nearly all migrants it detained. A Daily Beast investigation published earlier this year laid out the human cost of that policy—finding that petitions for release from unjust detention rose almost 10,000 percent by the end of the year.
Attorneys described clients breaking down in detention while waiting for their hearings. Rekha Sharma-Crawford, a Kansas City-based immigration lawyer, spoke of “an Iranian refugee” whose 180-day spell in custody had “ripped back any layers of healing that might have occurred” as a survivor of childhood abuse. Atlanta lawyer Karen Weinstock called the surge “a timeline of attacks on the constitutional rights of non-citizens” and warned the country had “simply become a banana republic.”
Monday’s NYT report also reveals a second, equally drastic plan that Miller helped advance last year. Vice President JD Vance, following the fatal shooting of two American citizens by federal immigration agents during protests against raids in Minnesota this January, pushed to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would have allowed the administration to deploy the military to the state.
Scharf objected again, having already written in an October memo that the law represented “a break-the-glass exception to the traditional, general prohibition on the use of the military in the domestic setting.” Tensions came to a head in January during what’s understood to have been a fraught meeting in Wiles’ office, where Vance demanded swift action with backing from Miller, who claimed the law’s provisions had never really been investigated or tested.
“That’s not true, Stephen,” Scharf shot back, according to the NYT. “It’s very prescriptive,” he added, as director of communications Steven Cheung and Wiles’ deputy James Blair laid out the political risks any such move would entail. Vance and Miller eventually backed off.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement to the newspaper that officials weigh “many different lawful options,” with Trump “always being the ultimate decider.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the president’s office for further comment on this story.
