If you violated the law, you are not entitled to due process.
– Rep. Victoria Spartz, March 2024

An elected official, sworn to uphold the Constitution, said that people, in this case illegal aliens who violated asylum laws, are not entitled to due process.

This is wrong.

Due process exists specifically to protect those accused of violating the law. The Bill of Rights contains more provisions safeguarding the rights of the accused than on any other subject. The government can deprive you of liberty through due process, but it cannot deprive you of due process itself. In the United States, due process is not a revocable privilege. It is an irrevocable right.

Due process is the mechanism by which we determine whether someone did violate the law. It’s the protection we guarantee before we investigate and convict. That’s the whole point. We’re not supposed to arrest people, skip the trial, and make them disappear. Immigrants are detained indefinitely without hearings, or sent to overseas prisons. Protesters and students are punished based on accusations, not findings. Politicians, like Spartz in this case, make accusations without basis in fact.

What if you are wrongly arrested because somebody erroneously accused you, or because you had the wrong tattoo, or because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time? It happened recently to a few cases that attracted national attention. To how many people did it happen that we’ll never hear from again?

We will never know.

It could be you or me next. Think about that.

We can’t cherry-pick the Constitution based on who we like or what someone is accused of doing. I still remember a guy I worked with back in the 1990ies. Let’s call him Rick. He was a Second Amendment enthusiast. When I simply suggested, even back then, that we should ban assault weapons, that we should have universal background checks, he would be furious because, according to him: “You are trampling on our sacred document, the Constitution!”

At the time, I was trampling, just by suggesting common sense solutions.

Are we not trampling now?