Summary
Immigration officials detained a US citizen for nearly 10 days in Arizona, according to court records and press reports.
On 8 April, a border patrol official found Hermosillo “without the proper immigration documents” and claimed that the young American had admitted entering the US illegally from Mexico.
On 17 April, a federal judge dismissed his case. “He did say he was a US citizen, but they didn’t believe him.”
“Under the Trump administration’s theory of the law, the government could have banished this U.S. citizen to a Salvadoran prison then refused to do anything to bring him back,” Mark Joseph Stern, a legal analyst for Slate, wrote on Bluesky. “This is why the Constitution guarantees due process to all. Could it be more obvious?”
Apply the So What principle: So what if I, as a private citizen, make a judgement about people who work for a government office? What’s the practical impact for this oh-so-unfairly-maligned hypothetical person you constructed? Nothing.
Now, what’s the practical impact when a government agency denies due process to people when it unlawfully detains them? Oh, yeah, that does seem like a real and substantive impact, doesn’t it?
I haven’t denied anyone’s rights to their life or their liberty, so you can take your false equivalency and shove it.
It’s a hypothetical so I’m not sure how you’d measure it but you’re certainly creating a division and fostering an us/them mentality. What purpose does it serve to make a broad statement that’s backed only by emotion and supposition that anybody associated with ICE is a bad person? Other than to make you feel better and more righteous?
It sure does! And we should all of us be against a government that does that. I think I could get on board with a statement like “Any person that knowingly and willingly helps the US government deprive any person of their rights in violation the US Constitution or the law is a bad person”.