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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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