Last Thursday, mega-podcaster Joe Rogan broke his allegiance to Donald Trump by condemning the administration’s policy of abducting people from the streets and covertly deporting them to a supermax prison in El Salvador, where the Constitution – including the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment – does not apply.
Over the weekend, I fielded viewers’ calls on this subject for C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, which revealed to me how so many people seem comfortable with Trump’s shocking defiance of basic due process guarantees. As Rogan put it, their argument goes something like this: “[W]hat do you do about all the criminals? ‘Take them all, fucking send them to El Salvador.’ What about due process? ‘No, fuck that.’
“Well, here’s the problem with ‘fuck that,’” Rogan continued. “What if you are an enemy of, let’s not say any current president. Let’s pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador. ‘You’re a gang member. No, I’m not. Prove it. What? I got to go to court. No. No due process.’”
(Rogan sang a slightly different tune just weeks before the election, remarking in a conversation with Shane Smith, co-founder of VICE Media, that “what we really have to do is make sure we don’t let in murderers, and fucking killers, and rapists, thieves and gang members; and a lot of them are getting through. That’s what we have to be careful about. It’s not just not letting people in.”)
From a legal standpoint, then, how feasible would it be for Trump to dispatch unmarked black vans to pick up US citizens and rendition them to torture prisons abroad? Do special protections kick in for citizens that don’t apply to migrants?
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