Due Process for One and All
The refusal by the Trump regime to provide Kilmar Abrego Garcia due process endangers every American's civil liberties
On January 20, Donald Trump mouthed the presidential oath of office to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” That promise would include the protection and defense of the Fifth Amendment, which states that no one shall be "deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
Yesterday Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen appeared on Fox News Sunday to stress how central civil liberty is to the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was taken to El Salvador without due process is being held hostage there in its notorious, traumatizing mega-prison. without due process. "I'm not vouching for the man,” said Van Hollen, who met Abrego Garcia on Thursday. “I'm vouching for the man's rights. His constitutional right to due process."
And then he explained why this is so important, not just for Abrego Garcia, but for everyone living in America,.“My whole point here is if you deprive one man of his constitutional rights, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody,” he said. And “if you threaten the rule of law for one person, you threaten if for everybody in America."
Meanwhile, the man who uttered the oath to protect our Constitution spent his weekend expanding his fabrications about Abrego Garcia—determined to persuade the court of public opinion why this allegedly heinous criminal does not deserve due process and fundamental civil liberties.
On Saturday, he posted an obviously fabricated photo of a hand with tattoos and, in what looks like a cheap photoshop job, the letters and numbers of the Venezuelan gang on his knuckles: MS-13. “I was elected to take bad people out of the United States,” Trump wrote, mocking the idea that Abrego Garcia is “such a fine and innocent person.”
Yesterday, on Easter Sunday, Trump continued his poisonous diatribe meant to underscore how right he is to keep Abrego Garcia and others in a foreign gulag. “Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,” he lied.
If Trump were so sure of Abrego Garcia’s guilt, it would make logical sense that he would support returning the Maryland man to the U.S. and to the judgement of U.S. courts after the government made its case. But not only has Trump worked aggressively to undermine the legitimacy of our court system and flout its rulings, he has worked even more intensely to undermine the capacity of millions of Americans to know what is true and false and to believe his lies over verifiable, evidence-based facts.
Remarkably, in an unusually swift order delivered in the middle of the night Saturday, the Supreme Court blocked additional deportations likely headed for the same El Salvador prison without judicial review. This followed an emergency request from the American Civil Liberties Union for the Court to intervene.
"The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court," the justices said in a short, unsigned decision. While Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas subsequently dissented, it is finally possible the high court may be tiring of the immunized Trump’s rejection of civil liberties and the rule of law for people he and his regime deems criminal.
There may have been no immediate indication Trump and his (emphasis on “his”) Justice Department will defy the Supreme Court this time, but there was little reason to rejoice on Easter Sunday (or any other day) that the Republicans’ amoral ruler has found religion and intends to follow the law or protect the Constitution. This is intolerable.
As Reagan-appointed Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III vividly put it Thursday, concerning the government’s responsibility to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, “If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?”
Permit me to rewind over three decades, to 1989, when real estate developer Trump made clear the depth of his hatefulness toward minorities, his sadistic desire to mete out deadly punishment and his belief in his own judgement over the value of civil liberties. That was when he paid for a full-page advertisement in The New York Times to rant about the failure of the judicial system and the need to reinstate capital punishment to execute the five Black and Hispanic teenagers known as the Central Park Five alleged to have brutally beaten and raped a white woman who was jogging in Central Park. “Bring Back The Death Penalty,” the headline screamed. “Bring Back our Police!”
“How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?” the text implored. “Criminals must be told that their CIVIL LIBERTIES END WHEN AN ATTACK ON OUR SAFETY BEGINS!”
And in a chilling precursor of what was to come from this hateful, unchanged man, he rejected then-New York Mayor Ed Koch’s urging to not respond to the murder with “hate and rancor.” Nope, not for Trump. “I want to hate these muggers and murderers,” he wrote. “They should be forced to suffer and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes. They must serve as examples so that others will think long and hard before committing a crime or an act of violence…I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them. I am looking to punish them.”
Except the five Black and Hispanic men, then teenagers who pled not guilty, were in fact innocent. They spent years in jail for crimes they did not commit before being exonerated by DNA evidence and the confession of a convicted rapist and murderer. As Yusef Salaam, one of the “exonerated five,” explained in a Washington Post op-ed, “When we were arrested, the police deprived us of food, drink or sleep for more than 24 hours. Under duress, we falsely confessed."
Salaam, now a New York City Council member, wrote about his experience in 2016 when Trump was running for president, noting that his “antics have filled me with fear.” He explained, “Trump has never apologized for calling for our deaths. In fact, he’s somehow still convinced that we belong in prison…I realize, too, that I’m not the only victim. Trump has smeared dozens of people, with no regard for the truth.”
Salaam and the four other exonerated men were back in the news ten days ago after a federal judge in Philadelphia refused Trump’s motion to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by the men. They are asking for damages after Trump made “false and defamatory” statements about them during his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris last year. In a reminder of Trump’s unending need to cause pain, they said that his knowing defamation was intended to inflict severe emotional distress on them.
In Trump’s 1989 ad, he stated about the Central Park Five, “I want them to understand our anger. I want them to be afraid.”
Nothing has changed, except now this hateful, vengeful man resides in our White House, backed by an attorney general and a Justice Department dedicated to doing his bidding even when it means making a mockery of the law. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is owed due process and his civil liberties, just as we all are.
One other note: I was uplifted to join the demonstration in New York City on Saturday, one of the hundreds of April 19 anti-Trump protests in every state in the country and the second mass protest after the April 5 “Hands Off” events. The anger, frustration and need for change is surely rising and portends larger street protests to come.
Here are some images and here’s a one-minute clip shared on Notes from my short Substack Live broadcast (that feels like foreign correspondence with its technical difficulties).
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“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial. That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.” - George Orwell
Orwell for the win, yet again.
“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?”
That is so “The Executive” can prevent two things. A more thorough investigation into the possibility of unlawfully captured citizens. And discouraging public dissent using intimidation and the ubiquitous cameras at protest marches that can single out you or me. If the citizens are under responsive, this is why, and it’s what Troub is going for. It’s what he wants. We can’t allow him to succeed in this kind of intimidation.