Another in an ongoing series.
Dear Senator;
I am a resident of Pennsylvania and a constituent of yours and I'd like you to answer a question or two.
The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution reads, in part:
No person shall...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...
The Fourteenth Amendment also contains this:
...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
And the Supreme Court has asserted, in 1993, that:
It is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in deportation proceedings.
Those first two texts clearly state "persons" and not "citizens" and SCOTUS has established due process rights for aliens.
And yet, The New York Times recently reported that:
President Trump asserted on Tuesday that undocumented immigrants should not be entitled to trials, insisting that his administration should be able to deport them without appearing before a judge.
The remarks, which he made in the Oval Office in front of reporters, were Mr. Trump’s latest broadside against the judiciary, which he has said is inhibiting his deportation powers. Mr. Trump falsely claimed that countries like Congo and Venezuela had emptied their prisons into the United States and that he therefore needed to bypass the constitutional demands of due process to expel the immigrants quickly.
Finally, The Supreme Court ruled:
On March 15, 2025, the United States removed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to El Salvador, where he is currently detained in the Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT). The United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.
Then there are the US Citizens (some of them only children) deported without meaningful due process.
I'd like to ask you, Senator, isn't it absolutely clear that all those deported - and, sadly, those yet to be deported - were absolutely entitled to due process? Why aren't you standing up to this administration's overstepping its constitutional authority? Don't you think that the Congress is an equal branch that was designed to serve as a check and balance over abuses of authority from the executive branch?
I'll await your answer, Senator.
As always, I will post your answer here at this blog.
