“Let’s be clear: without due process rights, anybody — yes, that means you — could be swept up in a raid and dumped in some hellhole and then the government could say, “Well, too late.” Citizenship is no protection if there’s not even a process in place to determine one’s legal status. One need not have any sentimental feelings about the victims of these violations: it doesn’t matter if they are good people, bad people, or if you just don’t like the looks of them; they are entitled to Constitutional rights. Insisting on the rights of others is entirely self-interested because, in principle, if it can happen to them, it can happen to you. That’s the whole idea of rights: they apply to everybody. What we are deciding now is if we still have a Constitution in this country.”
The U.S. government is taking people they allege are doing things they don’t like and deporting them to bad places without due process.
This seems clear cut: due process gives everyone on U.S. soil the right to be heard for charges against them. These people are not receiving due process. This is bad.
And like the quote above covers, it’s also bad for the people it’s not happening too. It’s not equally bad in the immediate, but scale this up and you can see how if something like the George Floyd Protests happen again in Trump’s second term, hundreds of people could be rounded up and… kept without any recourse.
This is sad and it is frightening.
My first reaction, especially in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was, “ok well the government knows it did something wrong so can’t it just say to El Salvador, ‘send this person back’?” Apparently, no! No, it cannot do that. Insane.
What are the incentives for the administration to close this door once it’s open (and it is)?
They aren’t clear, but momentum seems to go against reversing course since their reasoning seems to be, “We are keeping the country safe.”
It’s hard to retrace to a lower common denominator of safety once you artificially raise that bar.
I find it helpful to bring this down a few levels of abstraction:
What if the police in your town allege that rolling stops at stop signs and red lights are the most important issues facing the town. This is not just an important issue, say the police, it’s the most important issue! If people don’t fully stop at stop signs, someone could get run over. And not just one person, but everyone in the town could get hit and soon enough, “we don’t have a town anymore.”
No one really, fully, stops so the police quickly pull several people over.
Unlike routine traffic stops of the past, this is an urgent issue facing the town so the police don’t concern themselves with motorists paperwork.
They don’t write warnings.
They don’t write tickets.
They just begin arresting people.
It happens to a friend of a friend of a friend of yours.
They don’t get a court date to address their ticket.
They don’t get read their rights.
They don’t even get taken to the city jail.
As a part of the town’s fight against the threat of death by rolling stop, they’ve partnered with a neighboring city who already has a special jail for these motorists.
This is where the police take them.
They don’t get a phone call.
Their family is notified about what happened to them but don’t know what to do next.
At the end of each day, the police review the arrests made that day.
As they review your violation, it turns out that this person actually did fully stop. For a full three seconds.
The young police officer, new on the job, made an over-eager mistake.
The problem is, they’re now in a different jurisdiction altogether.
The police admit in some vague way that they made a mistake but they have no way of getting them back.
……….
So what happens next?
Are they the last motorist to be treated this way?
Were any deaths prevented by these crackdowns on rolling stops?
Are the lives of the town’s citizens safer?
……….
Not sure! Everyone moved on.
They’re Glibifying pictures of themselves on Twitter.
The stock market!
What about the tarrifs?
Want to go to that new taco place in town tonight?
Did I turn my student loan payments back on after COVID?
When’s the kid’s school thing again?
……….
One day, it happens to you.
It all felt distant and murky.
Until one day it wasn’t.
Forgive any typos or jumbled words. I typically write and hit Publish.
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