https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/10/donald-trump-immigration-deportations-due-process-00339319
Judges have a warning about Trump’s rapid deportations: Americans could be next
Judges across the country continue to note that if courts don’t protect the rights of the least popular and most vulnerable, everyone is at risk.
A fundamental promise by America’s founders — that no one should be punished by the state without a fair hearing — is under threat, a growing chorus of federal judges say.
That concept of “due process under law,” borrowed from the Magna Carta and enshrined in the Bill of Rights, is most clearly imperiled for the immigrants President Donald Trump intends to summarily deport, they say, but U.S. citizens should be wary, too.
Across the country, judges appointed by presidents of both parties — including Trump himself — are escalating warnings about what they see as an erosion of due process caused by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. What started with a focus on people Trump has deemed “terrorists” and “gang members” — despite their fierce denials — could easily expand to other groups, including Americans, these judges warn.
“When the courts say due process is important, we’re not unhinged, we’re not radicals,” U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Washington, D.C.-based appointee of President Joe Biden, said at a recent hearing. “We are literally trying to enforce a process embodied in probably the most significant document with respect to peoples’ rights against tyrannical government oppression. That’s what we’re doing here. Okay?”
It’s a fight that judges are increasingly casting as existential, rooted in the 5th Amendment’s guarantee that “no person shall … be deprived of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.” The word “person,” courts have noted, makes no distinction between citizens or noncitizens. The Supreme Court has long held that this fundamental promise extends to immigrants in deportation proceedings. In a 1993 opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia called that principle “well-established.”
The daily skirmishing between the White House and judges has obscured a slow-moving, nearly unanimous crescendo: If the courts don’t protect the rights of the most vulnerable, everyone is at risk.
“If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home?” wondered J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the Richmond-based 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. Wilkinson described an “incipient crisis” but also an opportunity to rally around the rule of law.
Trump and his aides push back
The Trump administration has resisted these odes to process as overwrought and unrealistic. Trump and his aides say voters elected him to cast out immigrants in the country illegally. That electoral mandate deserves virtually unlimited weight, they say.
“Over 77 million Americans gave President Trump a resounding Election Day mandate to enforce our immigration laws and mass deport criminal illegal aliens,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “The Trump administration is using every power endowed to the Executive Branch by the Constitution and Congress, such as Expedited Removal, to deliver on this mandate.”
Trump’s close adviser Stephen Miller has railed daily against what he’s called a “judicial coup” that has largely centered around rulings upholding due process rights of immigrants. Miller has scoffed at the notion that people Trump claims are terrorists — even if they deny it — must be allowed to contest their deportations, saying they only have the right to be deported. Miller suggested Friday that the White House was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, the right of due process to challenge a person’s detention by the government.
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