Trump Administration’s Attacks on Fundamental Constitutional Rights.
Under the First Amendment, we are guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of association and the rights to petition our government for redress of grievances.
Under the 5th and 14th Amendments we are guaranteed due process of law before our life, our liberties, and our property can be taken away by government action.
Procedural due process is the right to an evidentiary hearing before an independent decision maker who rules on the evidence and law presented at the hearing. The government must present convincing evidence that satisfies the legal requirements required to take away your life, liberty or property.
Last week, the government rounded up 200-300 individuals put them on planes and sent them to El Salvador where they were placed in a maximum-security prison. https://apnews.com/article/trump-venezuela-el-salvador-immigration-dd4f61999f85c4dd8bcaba7d4fc7c9af This is a prison notorious for egregious prisoner abuse. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-trump-deportations-gangs-intl-latam/index.html
The Administration claims the individuals were part of a gang called Tren de Aragura. They claimed that the US was at war with the gang who was invading the US. Trump claimed to be acting under the Alien Enemies Act of 1797, which has been used only three times in US history, most recently during World War II to round up and intern Japanese, Germans and Italians. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5331857/alien-enemies-act-trump-deportations It can only be used during a war declared by Congress; no such war exists.
The Administration took these actions in direct contravention of a federal judge’s order that the individuals’ due process rights must first be respected. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/timeline-trump-administrations-race-deport-hundreds-alleged-gang/story?id=119860136
If these individuals committed heinous crimes, as the Trump Administration contends, the right approach is to put the evidence before a judge and a criminal jury, try them, and punish them for the crimes they committed. If these individuals are undocumented, as the Administration contends, the right approach would have been to put them at a hearing before an immigration law judge and have them deported if the evidence warranted. Instead, they bypassed both the criminal justice and immigration justice system and stuck them in a horrendous jail in a foreign country with no semblance of due process. These may very well be heinous criminals, but what if some are wholly innocent individuals seeking political asylum in the US caught up in a dragnet just to show how tough Trump is on immigration. What is the possible justification for denying them a trial or evidentiary hearing? Apparently some of the individuals transferred have no criminal history at all, while according to his family the only inculpatory evidence for one of the men was a tattoo celebrating his mother. It will be interesting to see whether the Trump Administration ever presents criminal indictments and evidence against each of these individuals proving guilt of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt.