President Trump’s vicious and malicious rendition of immigrants to El Salvador is just one more reminder of what America’s immigration-control system is doing to our nation and to the values on which our nation was founded.
The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of his liberty without due process of law. Due process of law is a term that stretches all the way back to Magna Carta, when the great barons of England forced their king, at the point of a sword, to acknowledge that his powers over people were limited, not omnipotent.
Over the centuries, due process has come to mean notice and hearing. No person shall have his liberty taken away without providing him or her with notice of charges and a hearing or trial in which it is determined whether the charges are valid or not. In our system of government, the accused, after receiving notice, has the right to have a jury of regular citizens, rather than a judge or a tribunal, determine his guilt.
Under America’s immigration-control system, it is illegal for foreigners to enter the United States without official permission. Ordinarily, a hearing is conducted to determine whether the accused is guilty of the offense. There is one exception, however, under America’s immigration-control system: If an immigrant is caught near the border within 14 days of entry and without proper documentation, he or she is subject to “expedited removal” by being immediately deported, unless they express a fear of persecution, in which case they get a hearing on that issue.
El Salvador president Nayib Bukele. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
If an illegal immigrant is deported, that means he is peacefully returned to his country of origin. But that’s not what is going on with Trump’s deportees to El Salvador. Yes, a few of them are Salvadorans but the vast majority of them are from Venezuela. They are being treated in El Salvador as convicted criminals — horrific convicted criminals, not just illegal immigrants — by being punished in El Salvador’s brutal and tortuous, due-process-free, criminal-justice system.
Trump and his people are claiming that the deportees are members of a violent Venezuelan gang that engages in the sale of illicit drugs, trafficking of people, and commission of violence against innocent people. But the problem is that U.S. officials did not charge, prosecute, and convict them of any such crimes. Instead, they presumed they were guilty because they were convinced that they were guilty. Anyway, who needs a stinking trial, with pesky judges, juries, and defense lawyers when you’ve got a friendly ruler who is more than willing to punish these people without any such due-process niceties and simply in return for $6 million in U.S. taxpayer money? Keep in mind a discomforting possibility — that Venezuelans who are totally innocent of the gang charge and who are simply illegal immigrants might well be among those being incarcerated and tortured in El Salvador’s prison. The reason we can’t be certain is because of the denial of due process to them.
Keep in mind also that Trump and the Justice Department could have had these people indicted for their supposed offenses. In that case, the accused would have been formally advised of the charges. There would have been a jury trial in which the government would have to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt with competent and relevant evidence. If they failed to do that, the accused would go free — except for the possibility of deportation.
And that’s the other option that was available to Trump and his people. They could have simply deported the Venezuelans back to their country. If Venezuela refused to accept them, then they should have been kept here in the United States. To rendition them to a brutal foreign regime, especially with the aim of their being treated as convicted criminals is a moral and legal abomination.
Trump and El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele both know that Bukele is beyond the jurisdictional reach of America’s federal judges. Thus, he and his minions can do whatever they want to these immigrants. If the federal courts and the American people permit Trump and his people to get away with this vicious judicial ruse, it will constitute one of the biggest destructions of due process of law in history.
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