Where do you stand? If Trump can deport people , at will, on his own authority, we are in a Dictatorship.
Did you vote for a Dictatorship with propaganda as truth and no protection for yourself and your loved one’s ? If not, we must urge our Legislators across the Country to pushback against the Trump regime and start Impeachment proceedings before he causes more harm to us.
The attached article is from my subscription to Timothy Synder, a renown historian.
Democracy must be fought for daily. Vote, donate and let your representatives know you are angry. “We the People “ must follow the Rule of Law. There are consequences to disobeying our Laws. Shouldn’t our leaders be equally accountable?
Individuals associated with the federal government have, in defiance of a court order and without a trial or any form of due process, deported hundreds of people from the territory of the United States to El Salvador, where they will be held indefinitely in a concentration camp.
1. This violated fundamental rights enumerated in the Constitution. Everyone in the United States has the right to a fair trial with due process of law. People who say things along the lines of “enemy combatants don’t have the right to due process” are wrong. And it is important to understand the implications of that position. Anyone can be named an “enemy combatant.” More fundamentally, once you accept any exception to the general rule, you are just inviting executive power to always use that exception, or make up another one. If you are a citizen and you are casting doubt on the importance of due process, remember this: you need due process in order to prove that you are a citizen.
2. The deportation was done in violation of a court order, according to a plan to undo the rule of law. This means that the action was not only specifically illegal, but designed as a challenge to the rule of law as such. Naturally, the individuals who chose to ignore a court order carefully selected the moment when they would do so. They chose a situation that they could characterize as us against them, the Americans against the foreigners, the regular people against the criminals. They are deliberately associating the law itself with people, the deportees, who they expect to be unpopular. This is a tactic, and historically speaking a very familiar one. In this way they hope to get popular opinion on their side as they ignore a court order. But if they succeed in making an exception once, it becomes the rule.
3. You do not know who was on those two planes to El Salvador. The individuals who arranged the deportation claim that the deportees were “foreign alien terrorists,” but we have no way of knowing whether this is true. They also claim that they were “monsters,” which is not true. We do not know the names of the human beings who were deported. We cannot therefore know whether they were foreigners or American citizens. As to whether they were terrorists: they were not convicted of any crimes, and so it is hard to know whether or how this would be true. There is no doubt that their rights were violated. But your rights have been violated as well. If you do not know the details about operations that forcibly remove human beings from the territory of the United States, you do not have a responsive government. And you are therefore at risk.
4. Immigration and emigration are matters of legislation, the responsibility for which is delegated by the Constitution to Congress. In organizing a deportation outside the bounds of any particular law, and indeed outside the bounds of law in general, the executive is not only challenging Congress but disputing its purpose. The deportation action, in other words, is a direct blow not only to the judiciary but to the legislative branch of the federal government. It is an assertion of total executive authority that has no basis in law or tradition.
5. The individuals involved are declaring their power to define reality, independently not only of judicial but of all verification. There is no basis for this deportation beyond speech acts and keyboard acts. The words (“foreign alien terrorists,” “monsters”) are doing the work. There are no procedures between the movement of mouths and the movement of bodies. If members of the executive branch are allowed to issue truth claims that have the consequence that human beings leave the United States, we are in a dictatorship. If we accept that the executive branch can simply deport anyone they call a “foreign alien terrorist,” then none of us has any rights.