J.D. Vance Thinks Due-Process Rights Are Optional
By Nikki McCann Ramirez,
2025-04-16Vice President J.D. Vance has publicly come out in favor of disregarding due process rights in the United States.
In a lengthy X post published on Tuesday, Vance wrote: “To say the administration must observe ‘due process’ is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors. To put it in concrete terms, imposing the death penalty on an American citizen requires more legal process than deporting an illegal alien to their country of origin.”
It’s a nonsensical interpretation of due process rights. At their core, rights are not supposed to be negotiable based on how much resources the government has, or the amount of people they’re looking to deport. The Constitution includes legal protections to ensure the system is as fair and unbiased as possible. Is this always the case? No. Does the executive get to do away with these protections because they run counter to his political platform? Usually only in crumbling fascist regimes.
“Here’s a useful test: ask the people weeping over the lack of due process what precisely they propose for dealing with Biden’s millions and millions of illegals. And with reasonable resource and administrative judge constraints, does their solution allow us to deport at least a few million people per year?” Vance added. “If the answer is no, they’ve given their game away. They don’t want border security.”
While Vance would like to claim that the Trump administration’s attempts to skirt due process rights are a necessary sacrifice that is isolated to the realm of undocumented immigration enforcement, that’s not how these things work. The administration has also been arbitrarily stripping legal immigrants of their green cards in retaliation for their political advocacy. Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia student who organized pro-Palestinian protests at the university, was arrested this week during an interview for U.S. citizenship, for example.
Vance is not the only White House official defending the administration’s attempts to skirt the rule of law. During a Fox News interview on Tuesday, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued that Kilamar Abrego Garcia — a migrant living in Maryland who the Trump administration admitted was sent to a gulag in El Salvador due to an “administrative error” — was not entitled to due process.
“He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order from the United States. He is not legally even allowed to be in our country,” Miller said . “Under due process that these Democrats so venerate for illegal invaders, it is legally impermissible for him to have one more minute in this country. So we honored the law and obeyed the law by getting him out of the country.”
Miller is, unsurprisingly, misleading the public. Abrego Garcia was granted a protection from removal order granting him a measure of legal protection from deportation because of credible threats against his life in El Salvador. Furthermore, if the Trump administration was so confident that they could secure Abrego Garcia’s removal from the United States through the standard immigration process — where individuals have a right to contest their detention and advocate for their own interest — why not follow the process in the first place?
The Trump administration is going to great lengths to avoid complying with court orders — to the point of defying the Supreme Court . At the same time, Trump has indicated that he also wants to start shipping American citizens to El Salvador.
During a Monday meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Trump affirmed that he has instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to look into ways to denaturalize and deport “homegrown” criminals to prisons in El Salvador. “I’d like to go a step further. I said it to Pam [Bondi,] I don’t know what the laws are, we always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals […] that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country,” the president said.
It’s never been about securing the border, as Vance claims, it’s about a consolidation of authority in the presidency that would allow the executive to abuse the powers of his office with impunity. Undocumented migrants, legal immigrants, and green card holders have already been used as test subjects. There’s no telling what comes next.
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