It’s unclear whether the concept of due process is that difficult that non-lawyers, or perhaps just those disinterested, fail to grasp its significance, or people are just making up nonsense because it’s, well, inconvenient.
If you skipped the “due process” when you came into the country, you should be afforded no “due process” on your way out.
This view has gained some steam, even though it’s completely nonsensical. Due process has nothing to do with coming into the country and no one who understands the concept would twit something so absurd unless their point was to confuse and mislead the simpletons. Who would do such a thing? Why would any patriotic, Constitution-loving American do such a thing?
President Trump asserted on Tuesday that undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to trials, insisting that his administration should be able to deport them without appearing before a judge.
The remarks, which he made in the Oval Office in front of reporters, were Mr. Trump’s latest broadside against the judiciary, which he has said is inhibiting his deportation powers. Mr. Trump falsely claimed that countries like Congo and Venezuela had emptied their prisons into the United States and that he therefore needed to bypass the constitutional demands of due process to expel the immigrants quickly.
Trump has repeated regularly that countries have emptied their prisons and insane asylums to dump their unwanted at our border. There is no basis for this. There is no evidence of this. It’s just something Trump says over and over for the sake of scaring Americans and making them hate and fear aliens. Sure, some are criminals, and some are Ph.D. students. Most are just people seeking a better life for their children.
Even so, it has nothing to do with the problem, which is aliens entering and remaining without lawful authorization. They don’t have to be criminals or crazies, MS-13, 14 or 15, to be removable. It just makes it easier when you make people hate them.
“I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Mr. Trump said. “It wasn’t meant. The system wasn’t meant. And we don’t think there’s anything that says that.”
On the contrary, there is very much a system in place to deal with them, as demonstrated by Presidents Obama and Biden, both of whom deported vastly more immigrants than Trump.
He claimed that the “very bad people” he was removing from the country included killers, drug dealers and the mentally ill.
“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” Mr. Trump said. “The trial is going to take two years. We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.”
He made similar statements in a social media post on Monday in which he wrote, “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
If Trump’s point is that he wants to prosecute them as “criminals,” then they must be afforded the due process required. But if Trump just wants them deported (as opposed to renditioned to a foreign prison for life, which is not a consequence of being unlawfully in the country), then they need only go before an Immigration Judge, who is an employee of the Department of Justice and a “judge” in name only, and be given an opportunity to contest the charge that they are not authorized to be or remain in the United States.
It may facilitate deportation to have more immigration judges, even though Musk just got rid of a bunch in his DOGE frenzy, and the firings are continuing, to hold deportation hearings and give each putative deportee the opportunity to challenge deportation. But still too burdensome for you?
Representative Jonathan L. Jackson, Democrat of Illinois, wrote on social media: “‘We can’t give everyone a trial’ — excuse me, what?! That’s straight-up #dictator talk. Due process isn’t optional because it’s inconvenient. This is the United States, not a banana republic. If you want to shred the Constitution, just say so.”
The extent of due process required for removal proceedings isn’t remotely the same as that required for a criminal prosecution. To conflate the two is nonsense. Then again, it’s also nonsense to conflate deportation with renditioning people to foreign prisons for life. Deportation is the removal of aliens without authority to be here to their home countries, not a Salvadorean prison. If the latter is your goal, then you have to convict them of a crime before sentencing them to life. Otherwise, just send them back after they’ve been given the opportunity to challenge removal.
But there is one more piece to the puzzle that is troublesome. Using immigration judges to make determinations presumes they will be fair and impartial, and not merely rubber stamps to Boss Bondi, just as she does her boss’ bidding. Some wags suggest that the reason the Trump administration is firing immigration judges when they need them so desperately is that they’re getting rid of the ones who won’t get with the program by actually giving the immigrant a fair hearing.
Yet, even running aliens past a cooperative immigration judge for a few minutes before their plane leaves is too much trouble for Trump. Even the most minimal of due process is just such a hassle when it would be so much easier to just call them criminals and disappear them at will.