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The crux of the Abrego Garcia controversy is a dispute about who "morally" counts as an American citizen.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
But the thing is, this is already the case. The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible. (The US government must be able to value the citizen's return at less than infinity, or else they lose all negotiating leverage.) On the other hand, the government can drone-strike a citizen abroad without due process, and while that may stir up political pushback here at home, there are effectively no legal repercussions.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
To which the pro-Abrego Garcia camp will gesture around at the crowd of protesters they've assembled, waving "Free Abrego Garcia!" signs, and say "Great, come join us. Here's your sign!"
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed. For them, it is simply obvious that the failure of the Abrego Garcia advocacy has no implications whatsoever for the success of the hypothetical advocacy on behalf of a fellow citizen, and this is no cause for cognitive dissonance because citizens and illegal-immigrant non-citizens are two entirely separate categories.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable. If there is factional dispute over this basic question, then morally speaking there is no nation, but multiple distinct nations that happen to find themselves all mixed up in the same land. But I'm sure this is no great surprise.
There is a shocking credulity here with Abrego-Garcia's claims. These are the facts:
A man willing to go to such lengths to break the law as his first act in a nation will also lie to the courts of that nation. Any sane judge should presume the testimony of an illegal alien of his circumstances as unreliable; I can't imagine what was going through the judge's mind to believe a man who had eight years to make that claim. I assumed they were handcuffed by the law to presume truthfulness in asylum claims but it turns out they're not, the judge just took his testimony at face value and thought nothing of him being a criminal or indeed criminally lazy.
MS-13 is active in the Beltway. I'd say it's a point to questioning the claim of his being associated with a New York clique but if the CI was making shit up why wouldn't they say DC or Baltimore? There's also the lack of tattoos, but more and more MS-13 members aren't getting tattoos(p.12). It's not the witch's bind, the lack of tattoos isn't evidence of anything, but anymore that's exactly it: it's not evidence of anything, for either side.
The US justice system at least nominally and certainly historically strongly, strongly weights the rights of innocents. That is to say, if there's a tradeoff involved where some other good outcomes happen, but it has a real and practical cost in weakening what happens to a conceivably innocent person, that's still seen as a not-so-good tradeoff in many cases. A lot of legal wrangling goes into the exact balance, but structurally the overall tilt of the table on which the weights are balanced is a given. The table is not flat. The original creators, and many lawmakers and lawyers since then, all thought this was a good idea and did this on purpose. "Fairness" is a little subjective, so opinions can vary over time, but I think there's a pretty strong case for the legal system to stay this way. As you can tell from my username, perhaps, I would point out that we're on to 250 years of this working out pretty well for most people involved, in spite the absurdity of legal fees. Ultimately, it's still at least partially a values thing too, but
This case is bad because here, forget "do not pass Go", the game just ended immediately on drawing a bad card, even if your poor finance situation made this possible. It might have genuinely bankrupted you (to continue the Monopoly analogy) so the game probably was over, but that's not an excuse to flip the board, you have to actually check and count the money and the debts before you end the game!
Legal systems acknowledge that sometimes, the facts are so clear there's no need to wrangle things for too long. "Motion to dismiss", "summary judgement", these are all real things. You seem to be talking as if they didn't exist. They do.
You might just accept that someone flipped the board once, and deem it not worth the effort to try and restore the game state to what it was, but if someone is consistently flipping the board, that's no good. Even if you're just another sibling, not the parent, you gotta nip that behavior the bud, or your kid is always going to think it's an option, and they might be right if they flip a more complicated game later, which cannot be restored. Deportation to a foreign state directly to a prison with a significant chance of literal death is a board-flipping move that cannot be allowed to stand. Not even once.
Dude was an illegal immigrant. No one objects. Necessary process was confirming dude was illegal. Once that happens deporting his ass is appropriate.
You just can't skip the necessary process step though! Fundamentally, the executive branch can't decide things on their own like this, even if they are ultimately correct. It's typically a fairly bright line.
It isn’t clear what process is needed but this guy went through two hearings which found (1) he was an illegal subject to removal and (2) was a member of MS-13 (though the second wasn’t needed).
He went through way more process than what was needed to effectuate removal. The only dispute was where he was removed to.
That’s a pretty nontrivial dispute in this case!
I think that is a bit more trivial to the broader narrative. No one is being wrongfully removed. They aren’t just snatching random people. There was very good reason to deport this person who received significantly more due process than I think is warranted.
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