White House officials are eschewing normal legal processes as they rush to ramp up deportations, saying there is no time to afford unauthorized immigrants any rights — and that they don’t deserve them anyway.
While the Justice Department argues in court that it is working to comply with judges’ orders to provide migrants with due process before deporting them, President Trump and his top advisers are increasingly making a different argument altogether: Why should we?
In their rapid, maximalist campaign to apprehend and deport as many migrants as possible as quickly as possible, Mr. Trump and top members of his administration have abandoned any pretense of being bound by the constitutional limits that have constrained presidents of both parties in the past on immigration. Instead, they are asserting that when it comes to people who entered the United States illegally, the president has unchecked power to expel them without recourse, and that he has neither the time nor the obligation to do otherwise.
“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial,’” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday in the Oval Office. “The trial is going to take two years. We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.”
He made similar remarks on social media on Monday, writing: “We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”
Such statements are alarming to legal experts who note that in the United States civil rights are for everyone — not just citizens.
“It’s enormously disturbing,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “It is so troubling to hear the president and top executive officials give so little regard to the Constitution. It’s important to emphasize that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment says no person can be ‘deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.’ It doesn’t say ‘citizen.’”