by John W. Whitehead, Rutherford Institute:
“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you. The Trump regime is already targeting immigrants who are here legally simply because they expressed opinions that Trump disagreed with. What makes you think he’ll stop there? With no court to verify anything the Trump regime alleges, you could be arrested and sent to a prison in El Salvador for having views the regime dislikes.”—Robert Reich
Imagine this: you’re rounded up in the dead of night by government agents, arrested and sent to a detention center. The arresting agents don’t identify themselves, nor do they provide any documentation indicating why you are being detained. Nevertheless, without your family or friends knowing that you have been taken hostage, without anyone knowing where you are being transported or why, and without any opportunity to defend yourself or proclaim your innocence, you are flown out of the country to a foreign prison in a police state where you will have no rights whatsoever.
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There can be no understating the danger.
The war on due process is here.
No trials. No hearings. No rights. Just indefinite detention and secret deportations.
This is the fate that awaits every one of us, not just immigrants (legal or otherwise), if the government’s war on the Constitution remains unchecked.
As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”
More than two decades after the U.S. government in its post-9/11 frenzy transported individuals, some of whom had not been charged let alone convicted of a crime, to CIA black sites (secret detention centers located outside the U.S. authorized to torture detainees) as a means of sidestepping legal protocols, the Trump Administration is using extraordinary rendition to make those on its so-called “enemies list” disappear.
The first round of arrests and deportations to a mega-prison in El Salvador supposedly targeted members of the infamous Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here,” declared U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett. “Y’all could have put me up on Saturday and thrown me on a plane, thinking I’m a member of Tren de Aragua and giving me no chance to protest it and say somehow it’s a violation of presidential war powers.”
Carried out with little evidence and without court hearings or due process, these roundups reportedly may also have swept up individuals with no apparent connection to gang activity apart from common tattoos (firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jaguars) and other circumstantial evidence.
In a particularly Kafkaesque explanation for why some of the Venezuelan migrants who have no criminal records were targeted for arrest and deportation, government lawyers argued in court that their lack of a criminal record is in itself cause for concern.
In other words, the government is prepared to preemptively arrest and make people disappear, without any regard for legal protocols or due process, based solely on the president’s claim that they could at some point in the future pose a threat to national security.
This takes pre-crime and preemptive arrests to a whole new sinister level of potential abuses.
Are you starting to sense how quickly this could go off the rails?
This is how democracies collapse. This is how rights disappear overnight.
As lawyers challenging the government’s overreach warned, “If the President can designate any group as enemy aliens under the Act, and that designation is unreviewable, then there is no limit on who can be sent to a Salvadoran prison, or any limit on how long they will remain there. At present, the Salvadoran President is saying these men will be there at least a year and that this imprisonment is ‘renewable.’”
Also among those in danger of being made to disappear without any legal record or due process are individuals who have not been charged with or convicted of any crimes.
The most egregious of these incidents involve college students, scientists and doctors, all of them legal permanent residents of the U.S. who, while never having been charged with a crime, are accused of threatening national security by taking part in anti-war protests over the growing death toll in Gaza as a result of the Israeli-Hamas war, or sympathizing with the Palestinians, or being associated with someone who might sympathize with the Palestinians.
When merely exercising one’s right to criticize the government in word, deed or thought is equated to an act of domestic terrorism, we are all in trouble.
Whether those being rounded up and deported have done anything criminally wrong is not the point. That’s what the courts and the Constitution are for: to ensure that justice is served through due process and the right of the accused to have their day in court.
It’s not always a perfect system, but it is better than the alternative, which is outright tyranny.
The mass arrests and roundups thus far have been so haphazard that there is a very real likelihood that innocent individuals have also been swept up and deported.
American citizens could very well be next in line for this kind of treatment.
Native Americans, who are also American citizens, have reported being subjected to racial profiling by ICE agents and targeted because of their race or skin color.
