How Trump’s Alien Enemies Act Deportations Violate the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment
Most public debate over the Trump Administration’s efforts to use the Alien Enemies Act as a tool for deportation have focused on whether the invocation of the AEA is legal, and the administration’s apparent defiance of a court order blocking the deportation of some 137 Venezuelans under the Act. These are important issues. But not enough attention has focused on what is being done to the Venezuelans after their deportation: they are to be incarcerated for one year or more in El Salvador’s awful prison system.
This is much worse than “normal” deportation of undocumented immigrants, which is bad enough. With conventional deportation, the government removes the migrants from the US, but then sets them free in their country of origin (or at least as free as they can be under the oppressive regimes that govern places like Venezuela). In this case, by contrast, the deportees are sent to prison in terrible conditions. And that’s without ever being charged or convicted of any crime related to the ostensible reason for the deportation (supposed membership in the Tren de Aragua drug gang). The migrants in question did not get any opportunity at all to contest claims that they are members of TdA. All we have is the administration’s unsupported word. The government actually admits that “many” of the deportees do not have any criminal convictions of any kind. Moreover, publicly evidence suggests many of them are probably not actually gang members, and some even entered the US legally.
This policy is obviously unjust. Imprisoning people without any due process whatsoever is a cruel and evil practice usually used only by authoritarian states. And if the Trump administration gets away with it here, the
Article from Reason.com
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