Erwin Chemerinsky and
Mr. Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Tribe is an emeritus university professor of constitutional law at Harvard., The New York Times; We Should All Be Very, Very Afraid"Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.
In an astounding brief filed in the Supreme Court on Monday, the solicitor general of the United States argued that even when the government concedes that it has mistakenly deported someone to El Salvador and had him imprisoned there, the federal courts are powerless to do anything about it. The Supreme Court must immediately and emphatically reject this unwarranted claim of unlimited power to deprive people of their liberty without due process.
That would seem to be the obvious response. It was Thomas Jefferson who called the right of habeas corpus to protect against unlawful detention one of the “essential principles of our government.”
Jefferson’s concerns are underscored by the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a lawful resident of the United States, whom the federal government admits it wrongly deported to El Salvador. He has been incarcerated in El Salvador along with some 200 Venezuelan migrants deported there last month by the Trump administration, which says they were involved in criminal and gang activity...
If the government can disappear any people it wishes, dump them in a Salvadoran dungeon and prevent any court in this country from providing relief, we all should be very, very afraid."
