It is a terrible thing to be a lawyer for a crazed, antisocial serial criminal with no impulse control who is also a compulsive liar.  In a court of law, where rules, facts introduced as evidence and actual laws applied to those facts decide the merits of the case, it is difficult to legally defend someone who keeps changing their lying arguments and continually implicates themselves and their accomplices with careless, incriminating public statements.  If the criminal defendant is a braggart who cannot stop publicly taking credit for things that are flagrantly illegal, your nightmare as a lawyer gets worse still.

Here in the USA, the Constitution is the source of all law binding the federal government, and through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, every state government as well.   No government entity in the United States may deprive a person of life, liberty or property without a notice of its intent to do so and a hearing at which the accused may be heard.   This is called due process, the requirement of legal notice and an opportunity to be heard before any punishment is imposed. 

The process you are due, as someone in the United States legally (or illegally, for that matter) is — you must be charged with a crime and then given the opportunity to be heard by a judge before you can be imprisoned, fined, have your property seized, be deported, etc. 

The president had his myrmidons round up a few hundred seemingly random Hispanics, shave their heads, put them into orange jumpsuits and chains.  They then staged a photo op, marching these supposedly dangerous criminals onto a plane to be flown to a notorious penal colony-style prison  in El Salvador.   They staged a photo op on the other end, of these men deported without due process, or any process at all, actually, being marched off to the overcrowded supermax “terrorist” prison in El Salvador.

The family of one of these men, Abrego Garcia, a legal resident married to an American citizen, raising an autistic five-old child as well as two kids from his wife’s previous relationship, made an emergency motion in federal court to have him returned to the United States.  According to the testimony, Garcia has been, as most poor immigrants are, a model citizen, with protected status here because of credible threats of violence and death by gangs in El Salvador.

You may be familiar with the self-contradicting piece of doggerel  offered by the Trump administration in federal court to justify its actions, what I call the Nazi line about this case.  Call it the MAGA line if you like, but read a few histories of Mr. Hitler’s Germany and you will see no difference in technique.   Garcia was deported due to “administrative error” the administration admits, yet, Trump’s DOJ and all of his spokesmen and surrogates insist Garcia is also a member of the violent MS-13 gang.

Important thing to remember, MAGA arguments, like Nazi arguments, do not need to make any sense in the conventional sense of the word sense.  Picture the poor bastard lawyer who’s got to make this ridiculous clerical error/ but still terrorist, argument. He’s got to argue this in front of a judge not disposed to ignore the plain text of the US Constitution in order to approve clearly illegal actions by a flagrantly lawless government of lackeys serving a vengeful and ignorant madman.

Check out what he is forced to say, this poor bastard Trump DOJ lawyer. When I read this out loud to Seedj she said, “he’s not going to be in that job very long .”  I have to give this man props for his candor.

Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”

Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.

“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.” 

Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.

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