Donald Trump Calls For Eliminating Due Process For Immigrants

President Donald Trump proclaimed that those who enter the United States illegally should immediately be sent back without appearing before a judge or due process.

Trump tweeted his opinion Sunday, saying we must not allow people to “invade” the country. He doubled down on this Monday, insisting that allowing due process for illegal border crossers is too time consuming and instead suggested building a border wall to solve the issue.  

 

This is the latest development in the hot-button issue of the treatment of immigrants caught crossing the border illegally. Attorney Gen. Jeff Sessions announced a new “zero-tolerance” policy in April that meant anyone caught illegally entering the country would be criminally prosecuted. This has resulted in separating children from their parents.

In the weeks following the new policy, more than 2,000 children were taken from their parents and held in detention facilities that have been described as reminiscent of the World War II–era Japanese internment camps.

Trump signed an executive order to halt these separations last week, but it has left confusion as to how families should be reunited and the House is now facing voting on a sweeping immigration bill in the coming days. Despite the national outcry faced regarding family separations, the president has continued to tout his hard-line ideas.

His latest calls for depriving immigrants of due process are met with constitutional questions and dissent from fellow Republicans. According to the New York Times, some Republicans in Congress such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, have said the number of federal judges should be increased so migrant families have their cases heard sooner. The Times reports that as of May, federal immigration courts have faced a backlog of more than 700,000 cases.

The bill the House will be voting on this week would increase security measures along the border and help pave the way to citizenship for Dreamers. It would also mean, however, that immigrant families could be detained together indefinitely, which goes against a previous decree called the Flores settlement that said migrant families can be detained for no more than 20 days.