Why We Have Due Process -- Joyce Vance

[erronis]

https://joycevance.substack.com/p/why-we-have-due-process

Here’s a textbook explanation for why due process is so important: the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a native of El Salvador, who was included on the third plane full of aliens the Trump administration deported to that country on March 15. Only one problem, as the government now concedes in an affidavit filed in the case by Robert L. Cerna, the Acting Field Office Director for Enforcement and Removal Operations at ICE, “this removal was an error.”

Why was it an error? Because in 2019, an immigration judge entered an order that, while acknowledging Abrego Garcia was removable, granted a “witholding of removal” under a law that provides, “the Attorney General may not remove an alien to a country if the Attorney General decides that the alien's life or freedom would be threatened in that country because of the alien's race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” That order is still valid today—the government doesn’t contest that fact and Cerna acknowledges it in his affidavit. But Abrego Garcia was mistakenly added to a flight manifest as an alternate, and when others were removed from the list and he moved up, “The manifest did not indicate that Abrego Garcia should not be removed.”

So, now he’s in a hellhole of a prison in El Salvador at taxpayer expense. That’s your money and my money at work. The affidavit calls it “an administrative error,” an “oversight,” and says that “the removal was carried out in good faith.” I doubt that’s much consolation to Mr. Abrego Garcia and his family.

How many others were made? That’s what happens when you hustle people—yes, people, because those who are here without legal status are still human beings, no matter what this administration would have you believe—onto a plane and dispense them into a prison in a foreign country from which they have little, if any, recourse.

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