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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Exactly what due process do people think was missed? The guy had multiple days in court, and had a standing deportation order, no? If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed? If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?

How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants? There was certainly no due processes when they came in; can we hold the entire Biden administration and Democrat party in contempt?

Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?

I'm honestly baffled how people justify this to themselves as anything other than naked "rules for thee but not for me". Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?

This great man expressed his unflagging belief that "[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts." Id. at 3. Indeed, in our late Executive's own words, "[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result." Id.

Let whosoever among you has demanded prosecution for Blue State governors who ignore the clear and plain SC rulings on the 2nd Amendment be the first to speak up.

Exactly what due process do people think was missed?

They don't. They are simply lying. Yes, it is my belief that to say Garcia was "denied due process" is a lie.

I spent the first few days or so believing that the Trump administration had simply picked up someone off the street who looked brown enough to be an illegal immigrant and sent them off to El Salvamo without so much as a leaf of paperwork. No due process. No oversight.

I was lied to, and the lies had their intended effect of planting a false understanding of the facts into my mind. "This could happen to any citizen!" Please.

I'm most disappointed in myself. After eight years of this shit I still haven't learned to assume every negative thing I hear about Trump is an outright lie until I see it with my own eyes.

Garcia didn't get his, and you or I may not get ours (respectively, depending on who wins '28).

If that's supposed to sound scary, you should probably stop your side from using "due process" as a weapon to begin with.

Due process is never a weapon.

I completely disagree with this. Knowingly dragging an innocent person through the court system in an attempt to intimidate or punish him for his lawfully taken actions is a weapon, and has already been used. Cool! I get my "day in court", several in fact! I get to spend from tens up to hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting the feds, and if my lawyers slip up, I'm getting locked up. Yay "due process"!

It's the due process that gives you your several days in court, however taxing they may be, rather than just, say, being disappeared to a banana republic's prison system.

Sure. I'm not saying all systems with no due process are better than systems with due process, or that they're better on average, or anything like that. I'm saying fixating on the idea leaves you open to Goodhart’s Law, a failure mode that seems to be more and more frequent in western liberal democracies. If you want an extreme example, the Soviet Union had due process as well.

Indeed, the Soviet Union had so much due process that a friend of a friend once fled an ambulance on a broken leg because it was well known that the due process for discharging patients from hospital was so onerous many doctors never bothered.