tippinsights Editorial Board, TIPP Insights
Americans View the Legal Process as Being Manipulated to Undermine Immigration Enforcement and National Sovereignty.
Media coverage for the last four weeks has centered on the term “due process.”
Progressive lawyers, such as those from the ACLU; politicians like Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who grew up in the Clinton White House; federal judges like James Boasberg, and recently, even a majority of the Supreme Court, have been fixated on how actions by the Trump administration in evicting illegal aliens could sometimes impact due process. The argument is that unless these aliens are given their day in court, their removal could be unfair to them.
Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” Van Hollen described his trip to El Salvador to meet deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia and again prayed at the altar of “due process.”
The Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law because if we take it away from him, we jeopardize it for everybody else…I don’t think it’s ever wrong to protect the Constitution and protect due process rights.
Most people in the heartland are unlikely to buy into this argument. They would ask where these due process champions had been hiding in recent years.
Why did the New York judicial system repeatedly deny due process protections for President Trump when he was charged with a litany of civil and criminal violations? In the hush money case, when Trump was indicted in March 2023 and convicted in May 2024 for falsifying business records to conceal a payment to Stormy Daniels, wasn’t the prosecution’s novel legal theory—combining falsifying business records with the intent to violate election laws—vague and lacking clear precedent, thereby depriving Trump of fair notice of the charges? Didn’t Judge Juan Merchan’s rulings, including denying certain defense motions and imposing a gag order, restrict Trump’s ability to mount a full defense? How could a jury pool in heavily Democratic Manhattan that was inherently biased not undermine the impartiality required for due process for any individual, far less a former President? Finally, would these charges have been brought against anyone if that person hadn’t been called Trump?
When Van Hollen met deportee Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he said he never ascertained if Garcia was indeed an MS-13 gang member because doing so would mean that he would be following President Trump’s line of inquiry. Multiple courts had previously determined that Garcia was indeed a gang member against whom his wife had requested restraining orders because he routinely beat her. So, Garcia deserves due process, but not President Trump?
Second, most people in the heartland are unlikely to buy the liberals’ message that Constitutional protections of due process should apply to all deportees. When the Constitution was drafted, our Founding Fathers didn’t envision that a derelict President Biden would let 18 million plus illegals invade America. Many voters understand that for these protections to go away, the Constitution must be changed, but that would take forever. As a practical matter, the street instinct of those who have to put in a hard day of work to care for their families is: “They came in by the millions without invitation and scant regard for our laws; they need to be deported by the millions, due process be damned. If a president can let them in, a president can throw them out.”
Third, ordinary voters know that the liberal lawyers’ goal is to delay “due process” procedures through legal maneuvers in already backlogged courts allowing the aliens to continue staying in America. When an alien who has been admitted provisionally at the border because he sought asylum appears before a court, he does so before the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). This special court is part of the Department of Justice (DOJ). About 800 immigration judges are dispersed throughout the country to hear alien appeals.
Even if every judge hears and decides five cases a day, five days a week, for fifty weeks a year, simple arithmetic shows that it will take 18 years to clear the 18 million cases of the recent illegal arrivals. If one considers that the judges are already sitting on two million undecided cases, the new arrivals will have to wait two years before the first one is called up for review.
If a judge decides against the alien, the alien has a right to appeal the decision in front of a special body called the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA). The BIA doesn’t allow trials, but, like federal appellate courts, it reviews cases “on paper.” The BIA, located in Falls Church, Virginia, has only 20 board members, all of whom are senior immigration lawyers or former judges. If every case is appealed, it will take 720 years to adjudicate all cases, assuming the same five-cases-per-day schedule.
Meanwhile, circumstances change. While the aliens await their day in court, they are free to have children born in America. Unless the Supreme Court invalidates Birthright Citizenship, these aliens with American-born children can claim U.S. citizenship. Judges are unlikely to separate alien parents from their U.S. citizen children, allowing the aliens to stay.
The Democrats’ hatred toward President Trump is so deep that they would willingly use Constitutional protections to keep all 18 million illegal aliens in America using every existing legal tactic.
To the ordinary voter, who will probably never see the insides of a courthouse, “due process” is being exploited for political gain at the expense of America.
