‘We Are Not Stopping’
In court and the media, the Trump administration spent Monday asserting its power to deport asylum seekers without due process—and to ignore judges who get in the way.
“We are not stopping,” Tom Homan, the administration’s border czar, told Fox News on Monday. “I don’t care what the judges think.”
A similar message was reportedly delivered in a less direct way at the federal courthouse in Washington, where Trump administration lawyers refused to give direct answers to Judge James Boasberg’s questions about the deportation of over 200 Venezuelans over the weekend. Boasberg was trying to figure out the timeline of those deportation flights—some of which seem to have departed after he issued an order on Saturday halting them—but Justice Department attorneys said they could not disclose more information due to “national security” reasons, The New York Times reports.
Of course, the White House’s social media team had no such concerns as it gleefully bragged about sending dozens of people to a Central American prison without any proof of their guilt.
Trust the process. The bigger issue—one that was not part of Monday evening’s hearing—is whether Trump has the authority to deport anyone under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows deportations to occur without due process. Trump invoked the law on Saturday when he declared that members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan drug gang, had “unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare” against Americans.
The White House says most of the migrants deported over the weekend were believed to be Tren de Aragua members (while others were part of MS-13, a different gang). However, immigration attorneys have pointed out that the administration has not released detailed information about the individuals or explained why they were chosen for deportation.
REPORTER: How do you determine whether somebody is a gang member? What criteria do you use?HOMAN: Through various investigations
This is why due process matters. There’s a key difference between “suspected of being in a drug gang” and “yep, we know that guy is a member of a drug gang.” Eroding that distinction has all sorts of bad implications for freedom.
A troubling pattern. The Trump administration’s determination to ignore due process for would-be deportees would be worrying even if it were happening in a vacuum. However, that’s not the case. From the relatively low-stakes willingness of the Department of Government Efficiency to move fast and not wait for permission, to the Trump administration’s attempt to punish law firms for working with the administration’s opponents, and its ongoing attempt to undermine birthright c
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