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Raging anti-immigrant senior White House adviser Stephen Miller has been back in the news recently, perhaps not coincidentally, as Donald Trump’s mass deportation machine has ramped back up this summer. Predictably, Miller’s approach—attempting to remove as many immigrants as physically possible from the U.S.—has resulted in the Justice Department deporting some people by mistake, revoking hundreds of thousands of people’s legal status, and even killing innocent American citizens who dared protest the administration’s actions. Indeed, in the past two weeks alone, at least three people have been killed in encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, including one who was about to return home from visiting the United States on a tourist visa. Judges up and down the judiciary, meanwhile, have declared that the Trump administration’s deportation machine has been operating unlawfully, but the ensuing retreat has only been temporary. As the president’s immigration agenda has roared back to life with a vengeance, one of his most shocking acts went completely under the radar when it came to light last week. The plan: activate a controversial immigration court that has never once been used by any U.S. president. If it succeeds, Trump will have unlocked an entirely new level of immigration policy that quashes due process rights and will call into question who exactly the Constitution is meant to protect.

On July 15, the Justice Department filed an application with the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, a system that was created by Congress back in 1996 within the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. It was meant to create a pathway for the government to obtain meaningful judicial review in deportation cases while keeping its evidence secret. In practice, this means the U.S. government only has to provide classified evidence to the lawyer representing the subject of the ATRC case, while providing the subject only with an unclassified summary of the evidence.

Up until last week, the ATRC didn’t even have a website. That’s when one was hastily put together, popping up with little to no detail about what it is or how it operates. Because the ATRC process is so secretive, right now it’s not clear who the Trump administration is targeting with its new application to go through the court—the first such effort ever. However, we do know that the judge assigned to the case found the federal government hadn’t sufficiently proven its need to use the ATRC, and ordered the DOJ provide the court with more “factual or legal analysis” to justify its actions. A response was due by Wednesday. The DOJ has to fulfill three elements, all certified by the attorney general or deputy attorney general, in order to have its ATRC application approved: The noncitizen subject needs to be an alien terrorist, physically present in the U.S., and pose a risk to U.S. national security. If a judge denies the DOJ’s request, it can appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Because no presidential administration has........

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