White House Memo Opposed Habeas Corpus Suspension on April 29
Will Scharf used a confidential April 29, 2025 memo to push back on a White House plan to suspend habeas corpus, telling Susie Wiles that the move would almost certainly be struck down in court. The White House staff secretary, a Harvard-trained lawyer, argued against a proposal that Stephen Miller had advanced to speed deportations and bypass federal judges.
Scharf wrote that “Denial of habeas corpus rights was a key grievance underlying the American Revolution.” The memo placed the dispute inside the Trump White House, where a small group of arch-conservative lawyers quietly resisted Miller and JD Vance’s push for extraordinary constitutional measures.
Susie Wiles Memo
The April 29 memo went to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, who received Scharf’s legal warning after Miller had been pushing to suspend habeas corpus to accelerate deportations. Scharf had helped build the legal arguments behind Donald Trump’s presidential immunity victory at the Supreme Court, giving his objection added weight inside the West Wing.
White House Counsel David Warrington was also skeptical of the proposal, and some West Wing officials privately called the idea insane. Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair reinforced the pushback on political grounds, helping build a broader internal case against moving ahead.
JD Vance And The Insurrection Act
The same hard-line impulse surfaced in late January, when JD Vance pressed for immediate invocation of the Insurrection Act during a senior staff meeting after protests in Minnesota. The meeting followed federal agents’ shooting and killing of two American citizens during immigration enforcement operations, and Vance argued that swift action would deter future unrest. Stephen Miller supported invoking the Insurrection Act, but Scharf said the law did not fit the circumstances.
That disagreement showed how the White House debate went beyond deportation policy. One camp wanted tools that would sidestep judges and expand executive power fast; Scharf and other aides argued the legal and political costs were too high.
Habeas Corpus In U.S. History
Scharf’s memo also pointed to the narrow history of the writ: habeas corpus has been formally suspended only four times in U.S. history, and all four suspensions took place during wartime. The internal resistance mattered because the reported effort was not stopped by Democrats or federal judges at that stage, but by aides inside Donald Trump’s own White House.
The next obvious test is whether Miller, Vance, or other Trump advisers revive the same proposal in another form, or whether Wiles and Warrington keep the legal door closed inside the White House. For now, the April 29 memo stands as the clearest record of how a constitutional shortcut met resistance from lawyers inside the room.
