Amid the furor over the Trump White House’s defiance of the federal courts over a wrongly deported Maryland man and the government’s refusal to facilitate his return, public attention has shifted slightly away from the many other victims of the ongoing immigration purge. Close to 240 men, including Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who had a court order intended to block his deportation, have been shipped to a notorious El Salvador prison without official charges and no opportunity to defend themselves. Others, including the Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, have been detained but remain held in the U.S. without any legal basis for their confinement.
On Monday, President Trump said that he had no problem with sending U.S. citizens to be imprisoned in El Salvador. “I’m all for it,” he said. This degrading of our system of laws hurts us all and raises the chilling question of how far this administration will go. Federal Judge Harvie Wilkinson, in denying a request from the Trump administration to drop the matter wrote, “It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”
The often-expressed idea that immigrants are not following the law is mistaken in many cases. The previous border policy was for new arrivals to surrender to immigration authorities to vet their applications, which many did. Though the system might have had flaws and been overwhelmed at certain points, there was a system in place. Now chaos reigns, with even people who are in the country legally being taken away in unmarked vehicles based on their country of origin or their involvement in protests against the brutality of Israel’s Gaza bombardment.
Due process is a dry way of saying that the U.S. justice system is based on an expectation of fairness in courts — or at least the opportunity to defend oneself against allegations. This applies to citizens and noncitizens alike. Adjudicating immigration and free speech cases in a legally correct manner does not in and of itself threaten the U.S. as much as abandoning that right does. Secret police stuffing people into vans and loading others onto planes out of the country without so much as a hearing is not the American way.