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There is a shocking credulity here with Abrego-Garcia's claims. These are the facts:
A man willing to go to such lengths to break the law as his first act in a nation will also lie to the courts of that nation. Any sane judge should presume the testimony of an illegal alien of his circumstances as unreliable; I can't imagine what was going through the judge's mind to believe a man who had eight years to make that claim. I assumed they were handcuffed by the law to presume truthfulness in asylum claims but it turns out they're not, the judge just took his testimony at face value and thought nothing of him being a criminal or indeed criminally lazy.
MS-13 is active in the Beltway. I'd say it's a point to questioning the claim of his being associated with a New York clique but if the CI was making shit up why wouldn't they say DC or Baltimore? There's also the lack of tattoos, but more and more MS-13 members aren't getting tattoos(p.12). It's not the witch's bind, the lack of tattoos isn't evidence of anything, but anymore that's exactly it: it's not evidence of anything, for either side.
The US justice system at least nominally and certainly historically strongly, strongly weights the rights of innocents. That is to say, if there's a tradeoff involved where some other good outcomes happen, but it has a real and practical cost in weakening what happens to a conceivably innocent person, that's still seen as a not-so-good tradeoff in many cases. A lot of legal wrangling goes into the exact balance, but structurally the overall tilt of the table on which the weights are balanced is a given. The table is not flat. The original creators, and many lawmakers and lawyers since then, all thought this was a good idea and did this on purpose. "Fairness" is a little subjective, so opinions can vary over time, but I think there's a pretty strong case for the legal system to stay this way. As you can tell from my username, perhaps, I would point out that we're on to 250 years of this working out pretty well for most people involved, in spite the absurdity of legal fees. Ultimately, it's still at least partially a values thing too, but
This case is bad because here, forget "do not pass Go", the game just ended immediately on drawing a bad card, even if your poor finance situation made this possible. It might have genuinely bankrupted you (to continue the Monopoly analogy) so the game probably was over, but that's not an excuse to flip the board, you have to actually check and count the money and the debts before you end the game!
Legal systems acknowledge that sometimes, the facts are so clear there's no need to wrangle things for too long. "Motion to dismiss", "summary judgement", these are all real things. You seem to be talking as if they didn't exist. They do.
You might just accept that someone flipped the board once, and deem it not worth the effort to try and restore the game state to what it was, but if someone is consistently flipping the board, that's no good. Even if you're just another sibling, not the parent, you gotta nip that behavior the bud, or your kid is always going to think it's an option, and they might be right if they flip a more complicated game later, which cannot be restored. Deportation to a foreign state directly to a prison with a significant chance of literal death is a board-flipping move that cannot be allowed to stand. Not even once.
This is true, the purpose of the American justice system is to protect the accused. Mobs need no courts, the court exists as protection from the mob, for the man and for society.
Abrego-Garcia is not the accused, he is the guilty criminal. The question is his measure of criminality.
Courts should not assume just because he entered the country illegally that he would also join a notoriously murderous gang. Courts should assume that because he entered the country illegally, he would lie to remain in the country. Assuming he is lying, telling the truth would get him deported, but perjuring himself only might get him deported. Young children can follow these incentives.
Courts shouldn't take the negative inference, that would be presuming guilt. However, presuming he is a liar, or sufficiently motivated to deceit as to make sola testimony necessarily unreliable, is the only reasonable position. He had a decade to make that claim, this is not the behavior of a man in fear for his life. Where does that leave us? An El Salvadoran man who entered illegally, and that's all we know for sure. Okay, send him back.
To use the Monopoly metaphor, one player has an awful lot of fake-looking $500s, but when you call them on it they demand you prove each individual $500 is counterfeit while accusing you of trying to cheat. Why would they toss the board when they can just rig the game?
The whole point of a legal system is to take these assumptions and inferences, and then make them explicit, in court, rather than allow opinions to be made outside of the court structure. It defeats the entire point if judgement is rendered without recourse out of court.
Like, sure, if a Border Patrol agent apprehends someone at the border clearly trying to cross, my understanding is that it's fine to turn them around and send them right back. It's allowed, as a concession to being "reasonable", which is a thing in the legal world. Other people caught less immediately/obviously have to go through the court system, because the court system has a monopoly on appeals against state sanctioned violence, force, and punishment. That's one of its core jobs. There's obviously some wiggle room in the middle where plausibly, law enforcement (broadly defined) can just kick them out, but due process does kick in at some point. This guy has lived in the US for years, have kids who are citizens, have a wife who is a citizen, etc. Clearly, he needs to go through the normal process. If the process is short and somewhat perfunctory, okay whatever, that's fine. Even if we assume everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, that doesn't change the fact that the lies need to be heard in court before they are officially declared lies.
If the Monopoly game is rigged, it's the job of lawmakers to write better rules to prevent counterfeiting. You don't even need to prove that they cheated, everyone can vote and say "yeah that's sus, you're kicked out" and that's fine, the standards don't need to be perfect. It's still unacceptable to flip the game board.
The court system does not have a monopoly on that force as it applies to foreigners. The sovereign possesses a priori, categorical, unconditional authority on matters of border control. The reason we have courts is because we first had a border within which to enact laws. Where it pertains solely to deportation, the foreigner is owed no due process, no hearing, and in fact no explanation whatsoever for their expulsion. The justification is supreme at "Because it is our right." Moreover, we are under no sovereign obligation to play host to refugees. The asylum system is a courtesy, an act of generosity that like all contemporary acts of government "generosity" are at least attempted to be gamed 100 times for every 1 legitimate claimant. Yet even still Abrego-Garcia couldn't manage it years into Round 1 of the "We're going to deport you" party president.
Courts have ruled illegal aliens and foreigners are due such rights. No they aren't. The foreigner by definition is not part of the social contract of the nation they visit and worse is the illegal who in entering and residing perpetually violates the social contract. The courts have chosen to protect those whose acts if universalized would render this country unto nothing. Their positions don't originate in law or reason, they originate in those judges who contrived precedent from authority because of their beliefs in what ought to be. They have made their ruling, I await the day when we demand they enforce it.
As for law and order. Yeah, where one side has to still play by the rules to correct the rampant rule-breaking of the other. Tell me, what happens in a game when one player is found to be cheating? They don't roll it back to a point when they're sure there wasn't cheating. They don't run everything by the cheater, requiring their sign-off. They disqualify the cheater and award the win to the player who wasn't cheating. Harder to do in politics, to be sure. For every citizen like you who holds your position earnestly and in good faith, who really believes in these principles, you aren't outnumbered but you are vastly outgunned by the people taking your position in bad faith. Who appeal to law and order and slow attempts at deportations because their goal is for there to be no deportations. What is lawful and orderly about heeding the cheater's demands?
There are >30 million illegal aliens in this country, and even if it's the 10 million I've been hearing since 2005, how do we have trials for all of them? We don't. So what, fait accompli? We have to live with the consequences? Tossing that board is sounding real nice. But no, let's not, for the sake of this I'll agree, we will play exactly by the rules. We will give every single accused illegal alien in this country--who requests--a full trial. But those will wait, because we're playing exactly by the rules, and that means we're not holding their trials first, because we're holding other trials first, the ones from this:
Trump declares martial law, federalizes the national guards of the entire country, and proceeds with the dissolution of the state legislatures of the following: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Every single sitting or former city councilman or equivalent, mayor, state representative, senator, and governor who voted for or signed off on any policy or legislation that in any form would obviously aid and abet the continued residence of illegal aliens in their municipalities and states is arrested and charged with sedition, among other federal crimes.
This is playing by the rules. This is keeping the board. This is the moderate centrist option.
What an insane fan-fic reality that would be. At least you acknowledge that your position is at odds with the courts and thus ipso facto illegal. The lack of a typical social contract with an illegal immigrant does not immediately imply that all rights are forfeit, in fact the Framers explicitly rejected that notion. The idea is that the court should make at least a passing effort to assess whether deporting him to El Salvador specifically would seriously endanger him; rather, the courts already determined in 2019 this to be the case, so if he is to be deported, such an assessment much be overturned. This is at least superficially reasonable. There is a universal duty that the government not be party to reckless endangerment, even of foreigners. Until the process finishes, tough shit, the government can't do what it wants. It doesn't have to be a mega-detailed process, but it does have to happen. I'll say that personally, I don't find him super sympathetic. I also have mixed feelings about asylum laws in general - the country has a long history of welcoming people from countries in trouble, and prospering because of it, but just because a person's home country is a shitshow isn't a valid reason to illegally immigrate nor on its face create a substantial danger to return, and I do strongly resent the rhetoric of some on the left to this effect. Furthermore, I don't have that much sympathy for Republicans either because of how many torpedoed the last immigration compromise bill, which among other things would have hired a lot more judges so that cases exactly like this wouldn't drag on forever and consume government resources so much. The solution to policies you dislike is legislation, not intra-governmental disobedience. I'm pretty sure the legislature could curtail asylum laws, for example, if you so dislike them. Because remember, Garcia was both granted a stay on deportation AND the law also currently requires a certain process to be followed for such people to actually be deported. If you dislike this, the remedy is clear: change the law! The government is not, in fact, entitled to pick and choose which laws to follow, nor does your 'higher law' reasoning about social contracts supercede the actual laws.
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Dude was an illegal immigrant. No one objects. Necessary process was confirming dude was illegal. Once that happens deporting his ass is appropriate.
You just can't skip the necessary process step though! Fundamentally, the executive branch can't decide things on their own like this, even if they are ultimately correct. It's typically a fairly bright line.
It isn’t clear what process is needed but this guy went through two hearings which found (1) he was an illegal subject to removal and (2) was a member of MS-13 (though the second wasn’t needed).
He went through way more process than what was needed to effectuate removal. The only dispute was where he was removed to.
That’s a pretty nontrivial dispute in this case!
I think that is a bit more trivial to the broader narrative. No one is being wrongfully removed. They aren’t just snatching random people. There was very good reason to deport this person who received significantly more due process than I think is warranted.
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The inappropriate part was sending him to indefinite detention in a torture-prison that we are paying for and then, after admitting that it was an error, winking at the camera, chuckling “aww shucks sorry about that but there’s just nothing we can do… By the way, wouldn’t it be great if we could send citizens here too?”
Why do you have to lie about what the objection here is? Don’t let your animus overcome your faculties.
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