CNN conservative Scott Jennings led a spirited defense of the Trump administration’s refusal to make any efforts to return the Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador– before bashing a Democratic effort to retrieve Kilmar Abrego Garcia themselves.
Jennings, during a CNN panel discussion on Tuesday, insisted that Garcia received appropriate due process and that there was “no future where he, as an illegal immigrant with an existing deportation order, finishes out living a happy life in the United States.”
“They believe they're on the right side of immigration law, and they believe they're on the right side politically,” Jennings, a CNN regular, said of the Trump administration.
But Jennings quickly found himself taking heat for his position after CNN’s Kasie Hunt questioned him about President Donald Trump raising the possibility that “homegrown” criminals could soon face overseas deportation.
“The political point they're making is quite clear: if you are a violent person, if you've broken our immigration laws, we're here to keep Americans safe, and our opposition is apparently currently organizing congressional delegations to go to El Salvador to try to bring illegal aliens back to the United States – it's politically crazy.”
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When the one-time Mitch McConnell aide received pushback from others at the CNN table pointing out that Garcia has not been criminally charged, Jennings doubled down.
“You want to die on this hill, be my guest. It's political malpractice to send Democratic members of Congress to El Salvador to retrieve illegal aliens.”
Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck made clear that he views Jennings as "trying to make this a political conversation.”
“I'd like to get back to the law here, and the law here is that he was removed to El Salvador in defiance of a court order that literally said he could not be removed to El Salvador,” Vladeck said. “There was an existing legal process that the Trump administration could have followed to try to get that order wiped away.”
The law professor ended with a stark warning.“Without that due process, there's really nothing that separates someone like Mr. Abrego Garcia, really, frankly, from any of us. And so whatever the politics, there's a rather fundamental legal principle that's getting neglected here.
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