Without due process, ICE can make anyone disappear. Is that OK?

Masked ICE agents have been seizing people off the streets and disappearing them either to ICE detention centers over 1500 miles away, or to prison in El Salvador with no possibility of return. In doing so, they have violated court orders, attempted to avoid court review, and in some cases provided no opportunity for these individuals to prove they were legally present in the U.S. Now the president suggests he can do the same to U.S. citizens.

Update 4/14/25: As numerous sources are reporting, Trump is now openly defying a Supreme Court order that he facilitate the release of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador (see below for his story). Moreover, he is suggesting that he can send citizens to prison in El Salvador with no way for US courts to get them back. From The Atlantic (gift article): Trump is Defying the Supreme Court

• This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.
• The administration is maintaining that it has the power to send armed agents of the state to grab someone off the street and then, without a shred of due process, deport them to a Gulag in a foreign country and leave them there forever.
• Trump is already contemplating the possibility of deporting citizens. Aside from numerous public statements to that effect, Trump told Bukele, in an exchange posted on Bukele’s X feed, “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.” Loud laughter filled the Oval Office.

Timothy Snyder earlier put the stakes very clearly:

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.

— Timothy Snyder (@timothysnyder.bsky.social) 2025-03-24T22:18:15.262Z

And here is Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic (gift article) providing background and expanding on the implications: A Loophole That Would Swallow the Constitution: If Donald Trump can disappear people to El Salvador without due process, he can do anything.

• Donald Trump’s most frightening power grab was undertaken with an undertone of sinister jocularity. There was no column of tanks in the streets, no burning of the legislature. The president and his partner in despotism, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, were bantering amiably in the Oval Office in front of the press corps, mocking the American court system with evident delight.
• Trump’s ploy is almost insultingly simple. He has seized the power to arrest any person and whisk them to Bukele’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, where they will be held indefinitely without trial. Once they are in Bukele’s custody, Trump can deny them the protections of American law.
• Trump, who has threatened the territorial integrity of multiple hemispheric neighbors, now claims that requesting the return of a prisoner he paid El Salvador to take would violate that country’s sovereignty.
• And so Trump has opened up a trapdoor beneath the American legal system. This trapdoor is wide enough to swallow the entire Constitution. So long as he can find at least one foreign strongman to cooperate, Trump can, if he wishes, imprison any dissident, judge, journalist, member of Congress, or candidate for office.

Nick Miroff reports the horrifying specifics of the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in The Atlantic: An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

• The Trump administration says that it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return.
• Court filings show that Abrego Garcia came to the United States at age 16 in 2011 after fleeing gang threats in his native El Salvador. In 2019 he received a form of protected legal status known as “withholding of removal” from a U.S. immigration judge who found he would likely be targeted by gangs if deported back.
• Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney.
• [Garcia’s attorney] told the court that he believes Trump officials deported his client “through extrajudicial means because they believed that going through the immigration judge process took too long, and they feared that they might not win all of their cases.’’

Including Garcia, ICE has sent three planeloads of Venezuelan detainees to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. They were selected based on the presence of tattoos and other subjective evidence that led ICE to claim that they were members of the Tren de Aragua gang. NPR reports on the suspect nature of this “checklist”. The detainees were given no opportunity to contest this designation, and the planes carrying them to El Salvador continued on in spite of a federal judge’s order that they turn around and return to the U.S.

In another case, masked ICE agents seized a Tufts graduate student with a legitimate student visa off the street.

As CNN reports:

• Attorneys for Tufts University student accuse government of ‘secretive’ effort to move her across state lines
• Rümeysa Öztürk, the Turkish student detained by immigration officers in Boston last month, was moved across multiple state lines as part of a “highly unusual” and “secretive” attempt to keep her from accessing her attorney or being near her home, her attorneys charged Wednesday.
• [A]ttorneys for Öztürk accused the federal government of targeting the Tufts University graduate student because of her advocacy for Palestinian rights – a violation of Öztürk’s constitutionally protected right to free speech.
• “Ms. Öztürk’s counsel was kept in the dark about her client’s whereabouts as ICE quickly and quietly moved her to three separate locations in three different states on her way to Louisiana,” the attorneys wrote. “ICE’s deliberate and secretive hopscotch approach is an unlawful attempt to game the system.”
• Attorneys for Öztürk also accuse the government of ignoring an initial court order requiring them not to move her from the district without providing the court at least 48 hours’ notice. “Despite this order, ICE moved Öztürk to multiple locations and eventually to Louisiana without notifying the court, her counsel, or government counsel, thereby violating the court’s directive,” the lawyers wrote.

The U.S. government claims that Öztürk’s presence in the country would result in “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”. They have provided no evidence of her being any threat to the U.S. beyond her authorship of an op-ed in The Tufts Daily urging a “sincere effort to hold Israel accountable for clear violations of international law” in it’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

If you would like to read more about due process and its critical importance in keeping all of us safe, here’s an excellent editorial by David French in the NY Times (gift article).

Without the opportunity for due process – the opportunity to establish citizenship, legal residence, or to contest charges in front of a neutral judge – anyone could find themselves detained and deported – perhaps even to a gulag in El Salvador.

You can download the image below to make your own yard sign. See here for instructions.