The Trump Administration’s Increasing Hostility to Basic Due Process
“President Donald Trump has cracked down on immigration in his second term, deporting undocumented migrants and perhaps citizens next.
In the process, members of Trump’s administration have demonstrated an overt hostility to basic rights of due process.
On March 12, agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador. Three days later, the government deported him back to El Salvador to be held in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), an overcrowded and dangerous mega-prison where the country’s president offered to warehouse deportees from the U.S.
There is much to oppose in that action, perhaps most of all that Abrego Garcia—who had previously been granted a reprieve from deportation—was denied any semblance of due process when government agents grabbed him up, told him his protected status had been revoked, and shuffled him out of the country, all within the span of a long weekend.
The Trump administration contends Abrego Garcia is not entitled to due process, in part because he is a member of the violent street gang MS-13. “That may be true,” wrote Cato Institute scholar David Post. “The government, however, has provided no evidence, to a grand jury or to a magistrate or to any third party, that it is true.”
Nevertheless, the government is sticking by the claim.”
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“According to an April order by Judge Paula Xinis of the U.S. District Court of Maryland, Abrego Garcia immigrated from El Salvador to flee gang violence, settling in Maryland with his brother, a U.S. citizen. After he was arrested in 2019 and turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation, he told an immigration judge he would be subject to gang retaliation if he was sent back. The judge denied his request for bond and ordered him detained “pending the outcome of his requested relief from deportation,” as Xinis wrote. (By itself, a denial of bond is not indicative that he presents any danger: “The immigration judge is only taking at face value any evidence that the government provides,” said David Bier of the Cato Institute. “It is not assessing its underlying validity at that stage.”)
Later that year, “following a full evidentiary hearing, the [immigration judge] granted Abrego Garcia withholding of removal to El Salvador,” which “prohibits [the Department of Homeland Security] from returning an alien to the specific country in which he faces clear probability of persecution,” Xinis added.”
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“Vance’s post is galling for how little he seems to care about due process, the constitutional provision nominally preventing the government from throwing any of us in prison for any reason it wishes. That this seems to reflect the general attitude of the administration in which he serves would be frightening even if not for the fact that its only justification is that it simply doesn’t make mistakes when identifying terrorists and gang members.
“Ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with [former President Joe] Biden’s millions and millions of illegals,” Vance wrote. “And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?”
This has nothing to do with deporting the undocumented: A judge already adjudicated Abrego Garcia’s case and granted him a reprieve from deportation. If the Trump administration had contrary evidence indicating he should instead be deported, then it should present that evidence in a court of law.
Instead, what evidence has been presented is flimsy, to say the least. “The ‘evidence’ against Abrego Garcia consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie, and a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived,” Xinis wrote. “No evidence before the Court connects Abrego García to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.”
Even what flimsy evidence there is has fallen apart in recent days: That single “vague, uncorroborated allegation” was lodged by Ivan Mendez, a Maryland police officer who arrested Abrego Garcia in 2019. Within days, Mendez was suspended, and would later be indicted, for giving “confidential information” about “an on-going police investigation” to “a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts,” according to the Prince George’s County Police Department.”
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“”When Garcia was arrested he was found with rolls of cash and drugs,” wrote Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). “He was arrested with two other members of MS-13” while “wearing what is effectively MS-13’s uniform.””
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“wearing NBA merch is not a crime. And if Abrego Garcia were actually associating with MS-13 members, or if he were abusive to his wife, then these are details that would be extremely pertinent to bring up in a court of law.
Instead, the administration has obfuscated even in the face of judicial action. Earlier this month, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court order finding deportees were entitled to due process and instructing the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. The administration even admitted in court filings that Abrego Garcia was deported “because of an administrative error.” (The attorney who filed the brief containing that language was apparently later suspended.)
Nevertheless, the administration insists it has no ability to retrieve Abrego Garcia from the Salvadoran prison where the U.S. government is currently paying $25,000 to house him—what Reason’s Damon Root called “a naked assertion of unchecked power.” In the Oval Office, Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele each claimed they were unable to return the man mistakenly deported and housed in a facility intended for terrorists.”
https://reason.com/2025/04/17/the-trump-administrations-increasing-hostility-to-basic-due-process/