Trump ignores due process, uses El Salvador as a gulag for immigrants
Taking a page out of the Project 2025 playbook — Trump claimed during the election that he knew nothing about the document — the dictator wannabe occupying the White House is carrying out his mass deportation plans by denying immigrants their due process rights as spelled out in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments and sending them to a makeshift gulag in El Salvador.
Bush’s Guantanamo had nothing compared to what Trump is doing in Central America (via Tristan Snell):
Project 2025 made it crystal clear that, under Trump, immigrants were to be detained without any prior notice or due process, instead of being notified of their potential removal and given their day in court before an immigration judge. Once actually in office, Trump and his extremist cronies have gone even further, aiming to bypass the detention phase altogether and engage in immediate deportations before any legal process of any kind could take place, using the pretext of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a 1798 law that has only ever been used during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II.
Whereas before, there had been talk of building massive tent city concentration camps, that seems to have been dropped for now, and Trump moved to a brief-lived attempt to use Guantanamo Bay to detain immigrants. Now the administration has struck upon an even more diabolical avenue: disappearing immigrants off American soil entirely and outsourcing their detention to El Salvador and its infamous prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).
The administration has already sent hundreds of people to CECOT, and it then disingenuously claims that it is powerless to retrieve them once they are there. Detainees are then cut off from their lawyers and families and have no effective way to challenge the legality of their detentions — even if, for example, in the case of Kilmar Ábrego Garcia, the government admits it made an “administrative error” and that Garcia is innocent. In fact, 60 Minutes found that 75% of the immigrants sent to CECOT lacked any kind of criminal record — raising the likelihood that, if properly challenged in court, the administration would be unable to provide a legal basis for their detentions.
Even during the worst part of Bush’s Guantanamo, there was at least some post-detention legal process established, a Combatant Status Review Tribunal; this was one-sided and constitutionally inadequate, as the Supreme Court ruled in the landmark decision of Boumediene v. Bush in 2008, but at least it allowed some way for the detainees to challenge the legal basis for their detentions. Ultimately, Boumediene provided that the Guantanamo detainees could file habeas corpus petitions, which finally resulted in the court-ordered releases of hundreds of prisoners against the government had virtually no evidence at all.1
At CECOT, though, there is seemingly no way out.
As I documented in a piece I wrote in November 2024, Trump’s immigration “emergency” and his constitutionally questionable deportation plan — along with a myriad of other extreme police state policies — come directly from the Project 2025 agenda provided by the Heritage Foundation.
Project 2025 is a 900-page blueprint laying out Trump’s first 180 days, and the overall theme of the document is an expansion of presidential power that can only be described as the beginnings of a police state. Both Project 2025 and Agenda 47 call for a massive expansion and centralization of executive power that James Madison warned in The Federalist Papers, Number 47 can only be described as tyranny:
“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
Of course, the only way to truly institute Trump’s immigration agenda is by force, which brings us to the part of Project 2025 that directly applies to Trump’s recent promise to use the military as his personal police force:
- If successful, Trump will successfully reshape government by using the military to enforce his deportation scheme and use his “national emergency” declaration to build massive new detention camps to hold illegals indefinitely. (Emphasis mine)
Trump’s plan includes going city to city, house to house, to find illegals to deport, an act that would be illegal if the military is involved because it cannot be used as a national police force. Using the military in this manner is no different than the house-to-house searches we witnessed after the Boston Marathon bombing when the Constitution’s protection against “unreasonable search and seizure” was thrown out the window in the name of safety.
Confirmation of Trump’s plans to ignore due process and eventually use the military to build a police state to deport immigrants came to us from his “border czar” and former acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Tom Homan. In an appearance on FOX News, Homan reiterated his plan to “take the handcuffs off ICE” and ramp up arrests but noted that he will need more resources (such as the Department of Defense) to carry it out and said there are “a lot of what-ifs.”
“So, I’ve been asked a thousand times, how many people can you remove the first year? Well, how many agents do I have?” he said. “Can we bring rehired agents back; the ones that are retired bring them back and rehire them. How many buses do I have? How much money do I have for airplanes? Right? Can DOD assist? Because DOD can take a lot off our plate. There’s a lot of what ifs …” (Emphasis mine)
For the Trumpists out there, let me be clear: I want to see the illegal immigration problem fixed, and I have no problem with deporting them for criminal activity. However, I’m diametrically opposed to dealing with this or any other issue in an unconstitutional manner. Denying any immigrant the right to due process and to face their accusers in a court of law is, in fact, unconstitutional according to the Supreme Court.
“Once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” (Emphasis mine)
And here’s another reality to consider. What’s to stop government from finding other reasons to incarcerate people who don’t fit their mold? The evolution of the PATRIOT Act shows us how the target for enforcement of government’s wishes can be changed to fit their agenda. We need look no further than COVID tyranny for proof.
It’s already been established that Donald Trump will be using border security to introduce a mandatory national biometric digital ID capable of giving government the ability to track anyone and everyone it chooses. So, using Project 2025 as a guide to deny due process rights and deport immigrants to his El Salvador gulag while simultaneously building a police state — something he was already working on during his first term — is just another piece of the unconstitutional puzzle.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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