Editorial: Trump, Roberts tear down one of nation’s most sacred tenets: Right of due process

President Donald Trump, with the full support and complicity of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, has defied the very Constitution they swore to uphold, and effectively destroyed one of the most sacred legal tenets: the right to due process.

Family members and human rights advocates have insisted that many innocent people have been swept up in Trump’s mass deportation.

The administration has acknowledged that at least one person, Kilmar Abrego Garcia of Maryland, was nabbed and deported in error. Homeland Security officials still say the Salvadoran native is a member of a Mexican gang, and the administration is fighting court orders to bring him back.

Chief Justice John Roberts on Monday halted those orders “pending further order of the undersigned or of the court,” with no other explanation.

A panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding the original order from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, rightly held that the government “has no legal authority to snatch a person who is lawfully present in the United States off the street and remove him from the country without due process.”

Hundreds of immigrants, both legal and illegal, have been rounded up and sent not to their home countries, but to a prison camp in El Salvador that is known for its harsh treatment — many say abuse — of its prisoners. They include Abrego Garcia.

Evidence suggests that this reputation is precisely why the president made the deal with Salvadoran officials to send deportees there.

The Trump administration contends that once deportees are in El Salvador, the U.S. no longer has any control or jurisdiction over them.

Immigrants are being sent away without a chance to defend themselves and prove their legal status, based on immigration officials’ whims — apparently, simply having a tattoo is enough to warrant arrest and exile.

The sudden revocation of legal residency and deportation, without so much as a hearing, should concern everybody who came here legally, many of whom live, work and study in the Rio Grande Valley.

The Fifth Amendment of our Constitution clearly states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law ….”

That founding document, and our very legal system, is built upon English common law. One of its primary tenets is that “it is better that 10 guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” John Adams, our second president and one of our first legal giants, elaborated:

“When virtue itself is no security, that would be the end of all security whatsoever.”

It’s egregious that both our president and chief justice have either no understanding or no regard for the importance of due process. Collateral damage can’t be tolerated in our legal system. When we can’t trust our laws and those who carry them out — when even innocent people have to fear the proverbial “jackbooted thugs” — then the very fabric of the legal and social constructs that holds our society together is rent — perhaps irrevocably.

Abrego Garcia must be returned, and all detainees must be afforded due process before any punishment, including deportation, is executed.

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