The video below, with Judge Andrew Napolitano and his guest Aaron Maté, discusses some extremely disconcerting developments treating to President Trump’s deportation and foreign imprisonment policies, and their naked threats to civil liberties of citizens and non-citizens alike. Trump is not only deporting to foreign prisons hundreds (soon to be thousands) of illegal aliens for real crimes committed on US soil (which, by and of itself, has some precedent, though this tranche of criminals is being deprived of all due process in their summary removal). He is also having legal resident green card holders deported for very specious offenses which basically are the exercising of first amendment rights which umpteen court cases have determined to be constitutionally applicable to ALL legal residents, citizens or not. And all of the people listed above are being shanghaied out of the country without an initial hearing as a prelude to any deportation, which was confirmed this week by all nine Supreme Court justices as a violation of basic due process.
All of this is extremely dangerous and establishes very bad precedent, but it only sets the stage for much worse abuses of American citizens in the near future. At about the 13 minute mark, President Trump is actually shown saying – openly, and without even the slightest hint of a thought that this is not a good thing! – that American *citizens* committing grave crimes can be similarly deported to El Salvador and other hell-holes that the non-citizens are being sent to, in order to serve their sentences! Whoa!
Look, this is earth-shatteringly vile, and beyond dangerous. It is a massive violation of constitutional law, international precedents, and a direct abuse of presidential authority. Furthermore, as Judge Napolitano points out immediately after Trump’s words, everything he mentions as examples would involve state, not federal, courts for adjudication, so the overall scenario Trump paints is stretching even thinner the distinction between federal and state jurisdictions.
No matter how horrible or shocking a crime might be, there is absolutely ZERO precedent or legal justification for remanding *American citizens* to foreign prisons for crimes committed within the United States. Upon conviction, such criminals are to be punished within the state (or federal, when actually applicable) prison systems. Period.
MAGA had better pay attention to what’s going on here. Pandering to the law-and-order crowd, which is a major part of the MAGA movement, should be condemned by all of us in this instance. What Trump proposes is morally and legally repellent, and is an obvious scenario ripe for boomeranging against any of us, under arbitrary circumstances. If vile criminals who are American citizens can be treated this way, the door is open to water down the criteria for what constitutes a heinous crime in the first place. Indeed, if legal residents with a green card are already being deported without a hearing for merely speaking their minds about controversial political subjects, how long will it be before American citizens are dealt with similarly? Does summary deportation and/or foreign imprisonment for American citizens cause concern for you? Well, how about this: will contrived thought-crimes loom in the future for American citizens who run afoul of ever-increasing, arbitrary standards for what constitutes acceptable public discourse, with similar deportation “solutions”?
And (this is the part MAGA better wake up and “get” real quick!), people can say this is no big deal because they support Trump, and thus have nothing to fear, but political winds change frequently in the US, and inevitably there will be a Democrat administration installed who can use the by-then established legal precedents Trump established, and start arresting and deporting to foreign prison hell-holes oh…say… pro-life activists, or people who object to DEI, or transgenderism, or a host of other things that could be cited as liable to this “jurisprudential remedy”! What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and all that!
This must be opposed, by all of us. It is a non-starter on moral and constitutional grounds, and on a purely pragmatic level, leaves all Americans potentially subject to this sort of treatment as political majorities shift back and forth. A greater sign of the end of constitutional government could hardly be imagined; and no greater gateway to overt tyranny could trump (no pun intended) what’s left of our civil liberties.
Please, for heaven’s sake, watch the video below, and ruminate long and hard on the implications surrounding this issue, for both citizens and non-citizens alike.
