Government

Trump's New Pay-To-Play Asylum Machinations Will Violate Due Process

To say nothing of how they violate common sense, decency, morality, and human dignity.

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(photo via Getty)

Yesterday, Donald Trump announced his intention to charge people money for availing themselves of Constitutional and International Human Rights protections. It makes sense, after a fashion. We have installed a bigoted con-man as leader of the country, and refuse to remove him. It’s not surprising that such a man would ask people fleeing violence and oppression to pay a vig before the “land of the free” considers their need.

Donald Trump is basically a disgusting troll who wants to block people from crossing his bridge, only he’s too stupid to come up with any good questions so he just wants whatever they have that is shiny.

Trump announced other changes to the asylum process last night, all of them as arbitrary and capricious as the headline change. He wants all asylum cases currently in the system to be resolved in 180 days, despite providing no additional resources to speed resolution of these claims. And he wants to limit the ability of asylum seekers to get work permits while they wait for resolution of their claims.

The work-permit thing is particularly dumb, but well directed at Trump’s particularly dumb supporters. We know that there are legion of Trump supporters out there who falsely believe that starving Guatemalan families are coming to take the jobs that were actually outsourced two decades ago. Preventing these asylum seekers from “working” is exactly the kind of pointless cruelty #MAGA people go in for. Of course, the whole point of giving asylum seekers work-permits is so that they can support themselves instead of being a drain on government aid resources — a point which is lost on the jerks and idiots that make up the President’s base. When you have a government run by the cruelest people for the benefit of the dumbest people, these are the kinds of cruel and dumb decisions your government makes.

Unfortunately, I can’t tell you exactly how everything Trump is doing is illegal, because, as usual, Trump hasn’t yet translated any of his sadistic fantasies into the language of law yet. He has ordered new “acting” Homeland Security Secretary, Kevin McAleenan, to implement these changes. Since McAleenan has the job because former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen arguably refused to make these types of changes, it’s likely that McAleenan will give it his best shot.

But Nielsen didn’t oppose Trump on moral grounds. Her career has made clear that she has no ethical or moral principle in her body that she wouldn’t violate if it hurt a brown child. Nielsen’s opposition was strictly legal: Trump might want these things, but these are not legal things to do.

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Whatever McAleenan tries will be challenged in court, but anything that approaches these Trump directives would seem to be a rather obvious violation of due process. Trump, Steven Miller, and the rest of Trump’s band of bigots seems to not get one core concept of the Constitution: THAT IT EXISTS, and must be APPLIED to people who are in these lands. Asylum seekers are owed due process of law, just like everybody else.

Charging them a fee before they get their due process is by definition violative of due process. I don’t see how you get around that. Setting an arbitrary date for when cases already in the court system must be resolved is also a violation of due process.

And that’s before you even get into Trump’s authority to unilaterally change immigration laws without consent of Congress. A little thought experiment I like to play is “Imagine if President Danny Trejo did the opposite, would a Republican Congress object?” Would it be okay for President Trejo to say that all asylum seekers must be paid by the government while they wait for their cases to be resolved? Could he mandate that work-permits be given to all without them even having to apply? Could he order courts to take at least, say, 2 years of hearings and evidence before any decision could be rendered? And if he did, would he have to beat off Republican Congresspeople trying to stop him with a machete?

Trump’s proposals violate international humanity rights conventions and best practices for handling those seeking asylum. As usual, other countries are watching. The worst countries will feel free to also commit human rights atrocities in the name of secure borders. But the decent countries also lack the courage to stop us. The United Nations lacks the courage to call us out. We are a rogue nation, the international community should be treating us as such, but they want access to our consumer markets. Remember our and their failure here the next time America and Western Europe tries to push its “moral authority” around the world. I promise you, other nations will.

Trump’s asylum directives are dumb and cruel and McAleenan’s attempts to implement them will be challenged in multiple jurisdictions around the country. But Trump doesn’t actually want a victory over asylum seekers following the correct process to be legal immigrants. He just wants to rile up his base, and he’s willing to throw them the bodies of brown people to get them excited.

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Trump is a problem, but the people who like his policies are the sick, twisted bastards in this story.

Asylum Seekers Face New Restraints Under Latest Trump Orders [New York Times]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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