A government website has suffered a sudden "technical glitch" that led to the deletion of one of the most important, and least favored by Donald Trump, provisions of the US Constitution: the clause that guarantees individuals the right to challenge the legality of their detention and obliges the government to provide clear justifications for their imprisonment.

This right is known as "Habeas Corpus," a Latin term meaning "produce the body." This judicial writ is a fundamental constitutional right that protects individuals from unlawful or indefinite detention. Under it, the prosecution is compelled to bring the detained person before the court to state the reasons for their detention, ensuring that no one is imprisoned without just and legal cause. For more information, you can refer to the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School.

Stephen Miller, who served as deputy chief of staff in the White House, had previously raised the idea of suspending "Habeas Corpus" to support the President's efforts to arrest and deport immigrants. In a related context, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, who is co-leading Trump's mass deportation campaign, attempted to offer a misleading interpretation of the principle, claiming it was "a constitutional right for the President to remove people from this country," which completely contradicts the purpose of this constitutional right.

Over the past few weeks, Section 9 of Article One of the Constitution, which clearly states: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it," disappeared from the annotated Constitution page on the Library of Congress website.

By this morning, officials in the Trump administration began quietly informing staff that the deletions were simply the result of a "technical glitch."

As a result, staff quickly moved to fix the issue, investigate how it occurred, and review other parts of the site to ensure no similar deletions existed.

Doubts About the "Technical Glitch" Explanation and the Deletion of "Habeas Corpus"

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Some federal employees expressed skepticism regarding the "glitch" explanation, noting that the seemingly coincidental deletion affected parts of the Constitution that the second Trump administration openly seeks to undermine. The Library of Congress, for its part, described what happened on platform X (formerly Twitter) as a "coding error."

By afternoon, the deleted parts of the Constitution were restored to the webpage. While deleting clauses from the United States Constitution on a website does not change American law, the President and his senior officials have shown their determination to violate the Constitution as much as possible.

This modification to the Constitution's website comes at a time when Trump is attempting to assert control over the Library of Congress, even though the agency is technically part of the legislative branch. The Library serves as a research arm for Congress, in addition to maintaining the world's largest collection of books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, and recordings.

In May, Trump announced he would dismiss Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, before the end of her 10-year term, and appointed in her place Todd Blanche, a deputy attorney general, who previously served as Trump's personal lawyer.

After a judge refused to block Hayden's termination, she filed an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit last week.