Flood The Zone With Facts About Due Process Rights And Kilmar Abrego Garcia
The amount of lying from our government about a man they admitted to wrongfully sending to an El Salvadoran prison should put a chill in the spine of every American.
Apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter are soaking in disinformation spread by the United States’ president, vice president, attorney general, and DHS officials about the constitutional right to due process. The most powerful people in our government are lying to all of us in the most egregious ways possible, even platforming known liars who have worked on behalf of our nation’s enemies, and it is destroying the public’s ability to determine right from wrong.
Yesterday, the Trump administration gave Tim Pool the first question at the White House press briefing. Pool is a propagandist paid by the Russian government to inject racism and support for Elon Musk into American minds. He used his moment in the briefing room to give press secretary Karoline Leavitt another opportunity to lie about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man whose due process rights were violated by the government when he was sent to an El Savadoran maximum security prison based on an “administrative error.” The government continues to lie to the public to cover up its life altering error, saying that Abrego Garcia is a criminal gang member even as they fail to provide any evidence to support that claim in court proceedings.
The Trump administration’s lies are spreading like wildfire across social media. Many otherwise patriotic Americans are falling victim to this disinformation, leading them to unwittingly attack their own right to due process in social media posts.
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1 in 5 US adults gets all their news from social media influencers. There is little doubt that millions of Americans are coming across videos like the one above.
Just to emphasize the point about how awful the government’s behavior is, here’s Assistant Secretary of the Departmant of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, telling outrageous lies during an interview with ABC.
Two separate immigration judges did not rule that Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 member. It is also a flat out lie that Abrego Garcia is involved in human trafficking. And McLaughlin’s ‘labor trafficking"‘ comment likely is a reference to his arrest by Maryland police for loitering while looking for construciton work at a Home Depot in 2019.
It’s hard enough to understand what’s happening in the world without the government taking every opportunity it can to lie to the public about important matters related to constitutional rights. So let’s consult some fact based reporting on the Abrego Garcia matter and the broader issue of due process rights in America.
Poynter The Way
From Poynter:
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Abrego Garcia in 2019 as he was looking for day labor outside a Home Depot in Maryland. A police informant told police Abrego Garcia was an MS-13 member. Immigration judges denied Abrego Garcia bond, both initially and on appeal, citing the informant’s accusation.
In the initial denial, the judge said the determination of Abrego Garcia’s gang membership “appears to be trustworthy and is supported” by evidence from the Gang Field Interview Sheet which, in part, referenced the informant. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have repeatedly said in court that the informant’s accusation was fabricated.
The immigration judges’ decision to deny bond is not equivalent to ruling that Abrego Garcia was a gang member, David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said.
In immigration bond hearings, detainees have the burden of proof to show they are neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community. Abrego Garcia “failed to meet his burden to show that he was not a danger,” Bier said. That’s not the same as the government proving affirmatively that he was an MS-13 member.
“The immigration judge is only taking at face value any evidence that the government provides,” Bier said. “It is not assessing its underlying validity at that stage.”
Abrego Garcia later received an immigration protection called withholding of removal. Granting that protection required the Department of Homeland Security to decide Abrego Garcia was not “a danger to the security of the United States,” Bier said, quoting U.S. immigration law.
“The Trump administration did not appeal these determinations or the granting of withholding of removal,” Bier said. “So at that time, it did not consider him a threat and no new evidence has been presented since then.”
If you are a fact-warrior who wants to correct the record you can send people the above article from Poynter.
Fact-Based Influencers And Fact Check Orgs
And if you want to help your fellow Americans understand that both the 5th and 14th amendments explicitly provide due process to all persons on US soil, regardless of citizenship status, you can send them the videos and articles below. Because let’s face it, the people who most need to see this information are likely the same folks who get most of their news from social media influencers. Let’s expose them to fact-based influencers!
Attorney Ryan Stygar is a labor lawyer whose feed used to be full of videos about people’s legal rights in the workplace. For the past couple of months he has been dropping context bombs in opposition to all the dis- and misinformation online about the Trump administration’s disordered immigration crackdown.
Fourth Circuit Stands Up For Due Process:
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If Not Everyone Has Due Process, Then No One Has Due Process:
Pushing Back On A Commenter’s Misinformation About What Rights Are Afforded To Undocumented Immigrants:
Attorney Ryan can be liked and followed and shared widely by clicking on these links to his Instagram and TikTok. Do it!
Ryan Grim is a former Intercept reporter who left to form an outlet called Drop Site News. Recently Grim has regularly beenmaking videos that contextualize various immigration cases.
Grim Gives More Context To Abrego Garcia Case After Speaking To His Lawyer:
Sadistic Trump Administration Tactic, Revoke Visas Then Arrest People For Not Knowing:
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Ryan Grim can be liked and followed and shared widely by clicking on these links to his Instagram and TikTok. Do it!
One Article To School Them All
Share this article from FactCheck.org that refutes the lies the Trump administration has been telling about due process.
Some Trump administration officials, though, have suggested that there may be limits to due process. Border czar Tom Homan, for example, said that immigration agents are the “principal” judges of whether or not a detainee has gang affiliations and, if they determine that there is an affiliation, that detainee’s rights to due process are limited.
“People who are enemies of the United States don’t have the same level [of] due process [as in] the normal process,” Homan told Axios in an April interview, making an apparent reference to the administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to expel immigrants it alleges are gang members. A challenge to the use of that law is currently working its way through the courts, as we’ve explained.
And Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, posted on X on April 1: “Friendly reminder: If you illegally invaded our country the only ‘process’ you are entitled to is deportation.”
But immigrants — including those who crossed the border without authorization — have a right to due process, legal experts say.
“The thing about due process is that it either applies to everyone present in the United States or it applies to no one,” Amy Grenier, of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told us by email.
The article also provides a thorough explanation of how due process rights work and why Abrego Garcia must be able to utilize them.
The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution establish the right to due process — the Fifth Amendment says that “[n]o person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment extends this obligation to the states.
“There is no way to have due process and decide a group of people are not entitled to it. Due process includes the opportunity to know the charges against you and to argue against them. If a government is ensuring due process, every individual removed will know why they are removed, and they will have an opportunity to make their case on why they should not be prior to removal,” Grenier said. “This is true even for the undocumented, even if someone is here without authorization.”
She noted that the Constitution uses the word, “person,” not, citizen — meaning that it applies to everyone.
Fact Warriors, Mount Up
We are witnessing a coordinated disinformation campaign by the government against its citizens. The lack of respect for all of us—left, right, center—and for our Constitution is terrifying.
I will never stop emphasizing that we have fascism in America because we allowed it to happen. The fascist achieves his aims through propaganda. We’ve allowed an infintesimal minority of extremely wealthy religious extremist and fossil fuel billionaires, the real deep state, to overwhelm one third of our minds by creating media companies like Fox News, RSBN, OANN, Real America’s Voice, Breitbart, Daily Wire, Daily Caller, and on and on that do fake journalism and spread propaganda.
If the problem is one of information then so is the solution. Steve Bannon has vowed that the fascists will achieve victory by flooding the zone with shit. You and everyone you know needs to flood the zone with facts.
The alogrithms and headlines are tuned to create division by those who want to consolidate power. Fight back. Spread fact-based information that aligns with democracy every single time you are on social media. You can do it right now with the information in this article.
I’ll never stop working to get you the context you need to understand the news.
Now let’s do this.
Public Enlightenment provides the context we need to understand the news. When you sign up as a subscriber or pledge a paid subscription, you're agreeing that we’re in this mess because of our toxic information ecosystem. You know that we must fight like hell to improve everyone’s media diet. Every single day.
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Here’s to healthier information,
Brian
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