Trump 'simply floated' idea of deporting U.S. citizens, White House says
pbs.org
pbs.org
> For one man, it happened when he stepped out of a Chicago pizza shop after an afternoon of job hunting. For a 10-year-old girl and her siblings, it began at a Border Patrol checkpoint in South Texas as their family rushed to the hospital. For a man in Virginia, it started with immigration agents surrounding his truck, guns in hand.
> All those people are U.S. citizens who were detained, deported or otherwise swept up in immigration enforcement actions under the Trump administration’s intensifying crackdown.
> Although wrongful detentions and deportations of U.S. citizens aren’t unheard-of, recent news reports of at least seven alleged cases have alarmed attorneys, civil rights advocates and immigration scholars who say they reveal the dangers of a system accelerating with few safeguards. As the Trump administration pushes for mass deportations, expands federal enforcement and shutters oversight offices, experts warn citizens are increasingly at risk of getting caught in the dragnet.
> “As immigration officials become more indiscriminate about who they’re targeting — all while they’re pressured to deport people faster and to avoid immigration court proceedings — it creates a situation in which the possibility of illegally detaining and deporting a U.S. citizen rises immensely, because citizenship is not something that we can spot on people’s foreheads,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University.
If you think that's hyperbole, ask yourself whether you really, truly believed back in January that people were going to be seized off the street and deported to a movie-villain super prison in El Salvador, and taht the administration would admit it deported people in error and then shrug and say it had no way of retrieving them.
In other news, the government wants to spend $45 billion building new detention camps: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/us/politics/trump-adminis...
Due process doesn't exist just to let sneaky criminals make all their sneaky little arguments like "there is no evidence I committed a crime." It also exists to establish basic facts like "what is this person's name?"