Trump’s Denial of Due Process Is Tyranny
President Trump’s vicious and malicious rendition of immigrants to El Salvador is just one more reminder of what America’s immigration-control system is doing to our nation and to the values on which our nation was founded.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of his liberty without due process of law. Due process of law is a term that stretches all the way back to Magna Carta, when the great barons of England forced their king, at the point of a sword, to acknowledge that his powers over people were limited, not omnipotent.
Over the centuries, due process has come to mean notice and hearing. No person shall have his liberty taken away without providing him or her with notice of charges and a hearing or trial in which it is determined whether the charges are valid or not. In our system of government, the accused, after receiving notice, has the right to have a jury of regular citizens, rather than a judge or a tribunal, determine his guilt.
Under America’s immigration-control system, it is illegal for foreigners to enter the United States without official permission. Ordinarily, a hearing is conducted to determine whether the accused is guilty of the offense. There is one exception, however, under America’s immigration-control system: If an immigrant is caught near the border within 14 days of entry and without proper documentation, he or she is subject to “expedited removal” by being immediately deported, unless they express a fear of persecution, in which case they get a hearing on that issue.
El Salvador president Nayib Bukele. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
If an illegal immigrant is deported, that means he is peacefully returned to his country of origin. But that’s not what is going on with Trump’s deportees to El Salvador. Yes, a few of them are Salvadorans but the va
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