Trump on Sunday called for the US to deport people without judicial proceedings, referred to an invasion by "these people" and railed against standing immigration laws.
Klamath Falls, OR—When a president attacks due process, democracy itself is at risk
Trump has persistently expressed admiration for the autocrats of the world – from Vladimir Putin, whose agents have been implicated in the murders of political rivals, to Roberto Duterte, whose government has engaged in summary executions of suspected drug users. He’s also assailed the U.S. courts, fired an F.B.I. director over an investigation that threatens his presidency, and found nice things to say about neo-Nazis and racists marching in Charlottesville, Va., last year – one of whom allegedly killed a female protester with his car.
So it’s probably expecting too much to hope that a president with dreams of autocracy would care about due process.
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came. Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order. Most children come without parents...
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Our Immigration policy, laughed at all over the world, is very unfair to all of those people who have gone through the system legally and are waiting on line for years! Immigration must be based on merit - we need people who will help to Make America Great Again!
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Hiring manythousands of judges, and going through a long and complicated legal process, is not the way to go - will always be disfunctional. People must simply be stopped at the Border and told they cannot come into the U.S. illegally. Children brought back to their country......
Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump ....If this is done, illegal immigration will be stopped in it’s tracks - and at very little, by comparison, cost. This is the only real answer - and we must continue to BUILD THE WALL!
Such tweets, of course, play well with his political base. And that’s where the danger lies – when the American people support a political leader who has such a blatant disregard for the U.S. Constitution and the fundamentals of law, then the democracy itself is at risk.
Democracy is an exercise in faith, and trust in institutions. We can rely on the courts to curb the excesses of the government, but only so far as the courts are willing. A Republican Party that is willing to embrace a leader who undermines the rule of law and due process – a conservative legal principle meant to protect individual liberty – is sorely in need of some soul-searching.
Due Process George W. Carey - 05/10/11
'“Due process” is cherished by conservatives as one of the most significant legal principles to emerge from the English common law tradition. The origins of due process are generally understood to be contained in chapter 39 of the Magna Carta, which declares that “No freeman shall be arrested, or detained in prison, or deprived of his freehold, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way molested; and we will not set forth against him, nor send against him, unless by the lawful judgment of his peers and [or] by the law of this land.” Largely through the efforts of the famous English jurist Edward Coke, the phrase “law of the land” was replaced in legal parlance over time with the expression “due process of law.” At his urging, the fourth article of the Petition of Right (1628) reads “That no man of what estate or condition that he be, should be put out of his land or tenements, nor taken nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death without being brought to answer by due process of law.” The modern counterparts of this article, found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution as well as in various state constitutions, read that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”'
Trump holds children hostage until their parents agree to leave the US.
Trump is demanding an unthinkable ransom from traumatized parents who have no idea where their abducted children are.
Having essentially kidnapped more than 2,000 children and separated them from their parents, the Trump administration is now offering a demented deal: If parents who have been detained at the border agree to leave the country and give up their asylum claims, they can have their kids back.
The Department of Homeland Security released a fact sheet Saturday that finally explains how the government plans to reunite separated families. But that plan only covers parents who are “subject to removal,” and only promises to reunite children “for the purposes of removal.”
Incredibly, even parents who agree to accept deportation aren’t guaranteed to see their kids again. “It can’t guarantee that because we already know that some parents have accepted deportation and been deported alone."
In other words, parents might sign papers agreeing to be deported because they expect that they’ll see their children at the airport — only to be sent home without their kids and with no idea where they are.
Immigration attorney Cynthia Milian told the Texas Tribune that she had serious doubts the government would actually honor their word and reunite parents with detained children after parents agreed to voluntary deportation. “I just don’t see that happening,” she said.
DHS claims that the U.S. government knows where all children in its custody are located. But as some children are shipped out to facilities all across the country, local officials in the states they are being sent to can’t even get basic information about their whereabouts.
Trump officials “are very explicitly now using the children as literal hostages to short-circuit the due process protections that our president hates,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted. The Trump administration has failed to develop a coherent strategy for reuniting children with their parents, and the effort to find them has been riddled with bureaucratic chaos.
And Trump’s team now seems to be using the mayhem it created as a way to force immigrants to give up their dream of coming to the United States. This includes immigrants seeking legal asylum in the U.S., who typically turn themselves over to officials when they reach the border to start the process. Many are fleeing war or gang violence in Central American countries.
“Either a parent can keep fighting for asylum and accept that he won’t be able to see his children for the months or years his case might take — or he can give up, waive both his own rights and the rights of his child, and agree to be reunified with his child en route to the country both of them fled to begin with.”
Trump’s cruel Sophie’s Choice approach “goes against everything immigration policy has been about for decades in this country,” New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman noted on CNN.
The heartless “offer” comes after Trump explicitly advocated denying due process rights to unauthorized immigrants. Trump argued Sunday that people who cross the border illegally into the U.S. should immediately be deported without trial.
Trump is demanding an unthinkable ransom from traumatized parents who have no idea where their abducted children are, and forcing families to give up any chance they might have had at staying in the U.S.
Using kids as hostages is inhumane no matter who you are — and it’s unacceptable for the president of the United States.
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