(Note: This post includes crude language that I rarely use. I believe it is needed here.)
Here is section one of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United Staes Constitution. The emphasis is mine:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; 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.
In America everyone gets due process. That’s right there in the Constitution. We make sure those accused of crimes — murder, rape, child abuse, treason, even terrorism, or ANY other crime — are accorded opportunity to defend their innocence.
Every human being under the jurisdiction of We the People of the United States has a Constitutional right to due process. That even includes that most despicable man who occupies our presidency.
Yes, even Donald Trump. We know Donald Trump is a criminal. He was found guilty of 34 felonies and was found liable for many frauds and even a sexual assault. I am personally convinced that most of the MANY allegations of Trump’s frauds, sexual abuses, and other crimes are true. They fit with the behavior patterns we have watched play out in public over the last half-century or more. But EVEN Donald Trump gets due process in America. He has gotten and will get his day in court for defending himself against criminal allegations. To deny even the loathsome Mr. Trump his due process would be untrue to the pledges I have made nearly every morning of my teaching career. You know the ones to the republic for which our flag stands. It would be unAmerican.
So it is also unAmerican to support the arrests of other people without due process and their rendition to a concentration camp in El Salvador. This is intended to terrorize refugees and immigrants. This is a fascist tactic. This is unConstitutional. This is wrong on every level.
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| This scene is not from a gulag in the Soviet Union or a concentration camp in Nazi Germany; this is a scene staged by the President of the United States acting, supposedly, on the behalf of We the People of the "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave," |
To see uncharged, unconvicted, people — who have had no legal representation, no hearing before a judge or jury, no due process — shackled, shaved, bent, prodded, shoved, slapped by representatives of We the People of the United States is nauseating. Are some or even most of them guilty in Venezuela and/or the US of some crime? Probably so. But do we know that? No we don’t. And I’ll bet my next Social Security check that there’s at least one absolutely innocent person in the hell that Donald Trump and the assholes who support this infernal tactic have established. (I do not use crude language often, but sometimes it is demanded by the magnitude of evil needing description.)
If there is a literal hell and if anyone could actually deserve it, few would come closer to deserving it than those who support this outrage. But even though I believe that, I STILL would demand, even for those I have labeled “assholes," due process.
