'We have arrived': Analysts warn judges must decide if they're 'irrelevant' under Trump

Two legal analysts at Slate agreed the country has reached the point where courts must decide whether they matter. Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern pointed to the federal judge who ruled over the weekend that President Donald Trump's administration could not legally deport some of the migrants they sent to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. "But the White House defended its defiance of the order prohibiting deportations of Venezuelans, insisting that the judge had no jurisdiction over the migrants—and that Trump holds absolute, unreviewable constitutional authority to expel noncitizens." "We are long past the point at which courts have any reason to believe Trump’s lawyers when they use rhetorical tricks and deliberate misdirection to suggest that judicial orders were ambiguous or that compliance is inadvertently delayed in good faith," the legal experts said. "We are now at the place, only eight weeks into this presidency, at which judges must decide if they will take the necessary steps to enforce their decisions, including sanctions and contempt, or if they will agree to be made irrelevant."