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I think we should not suspend rights at any point. There should be due process. What I am opposed to is excessive/disproportionate litigation over due process.

I think we should not suspend rights at any point. There should be due process. What I am opposed to is excessive/disproportionate litigation over due process. The type of thing that seems like dragging of feet rather than assuring due process. I personally suspect the lawyerly class of people might be sympathetic to less stringent immigration laws. Another thing I think is demonstrably true is that in constitutional/civil law, meaning the cases that greatly impact the country involving the government, the top law schools seem to have much more voice. So for example Garcia's lawyer is a Yale law grad well known in the NGO sector and his cases have been heard in front of high courts like the SC who themselves are usually Ivy grads. So it's quite likely such people are not an independent group but may share a lot of opinions. I don't think that's a stretch to say. If they collectively lean towards making immigration easy and deportation hard, we might see that reflected in legal cases. So we had a situation where asylum was granted on a broad class basis like with the CHNV program that granted asylum to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela without a hearing. Trump attempted to revoke that status and the courts ruled he could only revoke it on a case-by-case basis (https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-blocks-trump-revoking-thousands-migrants-legal-status-2025-04-10/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-judge-blocks-trump-revoking...). I will also add that it's very unlikely Trump's mass deportation materializes because it's too logistically and legally costly. He said something about how it would take 200 years to complete the deportation hearings. This is the disproportionate situation I am opposed to. If it's easy in then it should also be easy out. So in short I am accusing lawyers of laundering an agenda through the courts. Originally asylum law was meant specifically in the context of WWII but it has expanded so that people fearing crime in their home countries are also included. This was done by courts through trials.

mattnewton 1y ago
You don’t have rights without a way to enforce them, and the courts are what our laws provide for the enforcement of rights against the government. Due process already doesn’t need to be costly, Bush, Biden and Obama all deported millions and processed millions of asylum claims using administrative processes invented for this. Trump’s admin either doesn’t want to or is incapable of doing the work of governing by the book; so they attempt to trample people’s rights and effectively deputize random border security with the power to detain you or even throw you in CECOT for life. This worries some foreign conference visitors. Because it’s not clear that any law actually prevents it from happening to them in practice, they’d rather not visit the US and interact with those border agents. It’s that simple, there is no conspiracy of the “lawyer class” or “excessive litigation” “dragging our feet” or a “media invention”. There has to be some due process or we have nothing enforcing our rights. There are no fast and easy solutions here, and I don’t think it is worth sacrificing it all to enable a strongman who can’t rise to the task otherwise. Let’s have a higher bar for the highest office in the land.

mattnewton 1y ago

You don’t have rights without a way to enforce them, and the courts are what our laws provide for the enforcement of rights against the government. Due process already doesn’t need to be costly, Bush, Biden and Obama all deported millions and processed millions of asylum claims using administrative processes invented for this. Trump’s admin either doesn’t want to or is incapable of doing the work of governing by the book; so they attempt to trample people’s rights and effectively deputize random border security with the power to detain you or even throw you in CECOT for life. This worries some foreign conference visitors. Because it’s not clear that any law actually prevents it from happening to them in practice, they’d rather not visit the US and interact with those border agents. It’s that simple, there is no conspiracy of the “lawyer class” or “excessive litigation” “dragging our feet” or a “media invention”. There has to be some due process or we have nothing enforcing our rights. There are no fast and easy solutions here, and I don’t think it is worth sacrificing it all to enable a strongman who can’t rise to the task otherwise. Let’s have a higher bar for the highest office in the land.