In a new analysis, New York Times Columnist Jamelle Bouie asserts, “The Trump administration believes it can send anyone it wants, without due process or future legal recourse, to rot in a foreign prison.”
Bouie broke down the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador. He noted the White House is “openly defying a court order to facilitate the return of an immigrant,” and questioned the Justice Department lawyers who “have asserted the president’s supposedly ‘inherent’ authority to remove foreign nationals from the United States.
Abrego Garcia was detained by ICE last month and was accused of being a member of the MS-13 gang. The 29-year-old was removed to El Salvador “without so much as a hearing.”
Both a Federal District Court judge and the Supreme Court upheld the decision to return Abrego Garcia. SCOTUS also unanimously ruled on “the Constitution’s clear guarantees of due process of law.”
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Bouie then slammed the administration for their inability to follow the law, “On Monday, during a state visit by El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele — the administration’s enthusiastic partner in the rendition of immigrants abroad — Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared that ‘no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States,’ a tacit assertion that President Trump can ignore court orders requiring Abrego Garcia’s release.”
This is “more than a constitutional crisis,” Bouie opined, “this is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power. To claim the authority to remand any American, citizen or otherwise, to a distant prison beyond the reach of any legal remedy is to violate centuries of Anglo-American legal tradition and shatter the very foundations of constitutional government in the United States.”
The former Chief Political Correspondent for Slate concluded by saying, “The president’s rendition program constitutes a profound assault on American freedom as understood for the whole of this nation’s history.”
