and all the rest of them, too.
This isn't about crimes or "very bad people" (except those in our mafia government h/t Sarah Kendzior) or tattoos. It's about due process. Jeffrey Dahmer got due process. Timothy McVeigh got due process. Nazis got the Nuremberg Trials. The people being disappeared right now--from Abrego Garcia to college students to "the worst of the worst of the worst"--DESERVE DUE PROCESS.
As Greg Sargent wrote yesterday in The New Republic:
It should go without saying that even if we ultimately learn terrible things about all these defendants, they are still entitled to due process. That’s how due process works: It’s afforded to everyone regardless of their eventual guilt or innocence. Indeed, this is precisely how we can be confident in the final decision that they are guilty or innocent under our laws.
Except it doesn't go without saying. The truth doesn't speak for itself; it has to be spoken by someone. And the truth is that this administration, our mafia government, doesn't care about guilt or innocence. It cares only about power and expressions of power. It believes it has the right to decide who gets treated lawfully and who doesn't simply because it has the power to do it and it wants to demonstrate that.
It simply cannot be that one vicious racketeer with his evil band of thugs gets to decide who lives and who dies. We cannot allow it.
Every detainee, and every deportee, and every one of us deserves to face our accusers and have our charges tried in front of judges and lawyers and the people who write it all down. We deserve it because it's right there in the American Bible everyone pretends to care so much about (emphasis mine):
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Persons have a RIGHT TO DUE PROCESS. It's what prevents Abrego Garcia--or you, or me--from ending up in a torture prison in El Salvador or Cuba--or Louisiana--by mistake with the mafia government shrugging that there's nothing they can do.
We are all Abrego Garcia.
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