The Trump Administration Continues To Attack Due Process
"We have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can't have a trial for all of these people," Trump said.
President Donald Trump and his administration continued to assault the concept of due process this week, with Trump claiming that undocumented immigrants shouldn't be entitled to appearances before judges prior to deportation.
"I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can't have a trial for all of these people," Trump said in the Oval Office on Tuesday. "It wasn't meant. The system wasn't meant. And we don't think there's anything that says that."
"We're getting them out, and a judge can't say, 'No, you have to have a trial,'" Trump continued. "The trial is going to take two years. We're going to have a very dangerous country if we're not allowed to do what we're entitled to do."
The Trump administration is pursuing its mass deportation program through multiple different strategies, some traditional and some brazenly illegal, but all of them share a bedrock belief that the judicial branch has little to no authority to halt deportations once the government has decided someone is subject to removal.
In a social media post on Monday, Trump wrote, "We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years."
If the Trump administration was genuinely worried about the case backlog, it wouldn't be firing immigration judges. It sacked at least eight immigration judges on Tuesday, on top of two dozen that have resigned or been fired since Trump's second term began.
Vice President J.D. Vance posted similar comments on social media deriding due process recently: "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. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?"
Trump and Vance's claims that due process can be swept aside if it's incompatible with the government's preferred ends inverts the entire point of due process. If the government can't deport millions of people a year while guaranteeing them due process, then it must not deport millions of people a year.
The other rhetorical trial balloon that Trump administration officials and pundits are floating is using immigrants' alleged criminality, both individually and generally, to claim that they have received all the process due to them.
The Trump administration's "border czar," Tom Homan, spoke to reporters this morning about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who three government officials said was mistakenly sent to El Salvador's most notorious prison along with several hundred other alleged gang members. The Trump administration now refuses to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., claiming with hearsay evidence or no evidence at all that he is a member of the MS-13 gang, a human trafficker, and a terrorist.
"I'll let the DOJ argue this in court, but I think we removed a public safety threat, gang member, designated terrorist, from the United States who had been ordered deported twice by a federal judge," Homan said. "I think he got plenty of due process. He got more process than Laken Riley got."
Riley was a 22-year-old Georgia woman murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela in 2024. Her murder became a rallying cry for hardline immigration opponents.
Besides the fact that Riley's murder has nothing to do with Abrego Garcia's case—a non sequitur unless Homan thinks that Latinos are interchangeably responsible for each others' crimes—Homan's argument is essentially that the government should lower itself to the behavior of criminals to seek retribution against criminals. That's an argument for less law and order, not more.
But this is a feature, not a bug, of the Trump administration's erroneous and bad-faith claims about due process. Homan previously derided the American Civil Liberties Union's "know your rights" seminars for immigrants and suggested Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) should be investigated by the Justice Department for holding similar webinars.
"They call it 'know your rights,'" Homan said. "I call it 'how to escape arrest.'"
These kinds of comments underscore the importance of guaranteeing civil liberties for everyone and just how hostile the Trump administration is to the basic concepts of constitutional order.
