It can be hard, living in a free society. In places where the rule of law prevails, and where all people — citizens, criminals, immigrants — are believed to be endowed with certain inalienable rights, guilt or innocence is determined by an independent judiciary and a jury of one’s peers. Even when the facts of the matter are hardly contested, liberty and justice require that the accused be judged not by the mob, or any one person, but through an oft-lengthy process wherein they are entitled to challenge the evidence against them.
Have you ever been certain of something, only to be later proven wrong? That happens to governments, even when they are composed of people doing their best to ascertain the truth; due process serves to protect everyone from an earnest mistake, but it also has safeguards against the possibility that the state may one day be run by those who are not acting in good faith at all.
That process isn’t perfect, and actually existing criminal justice systems tend to fall short of the ideal: sometimes the guilty get off, and sometimes the innocent are condemned. But it beats the alternative: tyranny.
In a tyrannical system, the accused’s guilt is determined by their being accused in the first place. If the government says someone is a terrorist, then they are dealt with accordingly. There is no appeal and indeed there is no formal process at all beyond the pronouncement: terrorist; guilty.
That is the system that the Trump administration would like everyone in America to live under — one where the word of a 78-year-old man and his underlings is enough to justify sending anyone to a foreign prison for the rest of their life.
To date, that goal has been largely implicit. Hundreds of men have been sent to a notorious detention facility in El Salvador where, according to the administration, they will spend the rest of their lives. All have been tarred as terrorists and gang members, but the vast majority have never been convicted of so much as shoplifting — in the United States or elsewhere. Among them is a barber from Venezuela, a gay man who was labeled a member of the gang Tren de Aragua based on the say-so of one former, discredited police officer who lost his gig in law enforcement after reportedly crashing his car, while intoxicated, into a family’s home. Another is a 19-year-old who entered the country legally and had a permit to work but was reportedly grabbed by ICE agents during an operation that was targeting someone else.
The most prominent case has been that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who a Department of Justice lawyer admitted was wrongly expelled from the country as a court had earlier issued him a protection from deportation order (that DOJ lawyer has since been fired for his honesty). The Trump administration has offered a series of post-facto excuses for why this father and union apprentice should be denied the opportunity to ever see his family again, centering on the claim that he was a member of MS-13; as with the barber, that too is an allegation that relies on the testimony of an unreliable cop — one who later pleaded guilty to giving confidential police information to a sex worker, according to The New Republic.
No real court would have sentenced Abrego Garcia to life in prison over such flimsy evidence (White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, apparently improvising, on Tuesday added another claimed offense, one that has never even been asserted in a legal filing: human trafficking. The lack of real evidence of any guilt, much less the kind that would argue for depriving him of liberty forever, is why he was never presented before a court — and it is why, presumably, President Donald Trump is defying a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return to the country, which would risk allowing him to speak freely about his ordeal and the conditions inside a prison that no one detained within has ever left, alive.
But one need not piece together from its actions what the Trump administration really thinks of due process and the rule of law. On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance made explicit that the intent is to defy legal principles that date back to antiquity, scolding those who insist on respecting the rights of the “many” undocumented immigrants who have “committed violent crimes, or facilitated fentanyl and sex trafficking.”
“To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” Vance wrote on social media. “To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.”
Ignoring that the hundreds of people sent to El Salvador had never stepped foot in that country before, Vance rattled off his main point: That it’s too hard to provide “illegal aliens” with anything resembling due process, which itself, you know, “produces errors.” Because trial by jury is cumbersome, and justice still not guaranteed, why bother with any process at all?
“What I am OK with is the reality that any human system will produce errors. Further, I accept the actual tradeoff: between not enforcing the law and enforcing the law. And I choose the latter despite the inevitable errors,” Vance wrote.
Put plainly: The vice president of the United States is arguing for the embrace of abject tyranny, where perceived membership in a category — “illegal alien” — is sufficient for unilaterally sentencing someone to life imprisonment with no recourse. While framed as applying to the foreign-born, deprived of the rights endowed by their creator, there is no need to argue that this poses the threat of a slippery slope: a government that has already expelled legal immigrants is obviously capable of falsely labeling a U.S. citizen a member of this enemy class, and indeed its top officials are arguing that such “inevitable errors” are a small price to pay for cleansing “the blood of the country.”
It is hard to live in a free society and a free society is even harder to maintain; it is more difficult, still, to get it back once it is gone. History will judge where America stood about 90 days into the second Trump presidency, but this much is certain: The moment that one group is exempted from the rule of law, no one is safe from the capricious malice of a petty tyrant — and if no one resists such an assault on civilization, then freedom is lost.
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