Compare & Contrast on Due Process: David Leopold Op-Ed vs. Stephen Miller Comments

Read AV legal advisor David Leopold’s Washington Post op-ed and access online version of this press release HERE

Washington, DC — In this Sunday’s Washington Post op-ed, America’s Voice legal advisor and leading immigration attorney David Leopold writes, “Trump’s immigrant purge is part of a larger agenda,” detailing that a “common theme” in the administration’s recent detentions and deportations is the stripping of “the right to due process” and noting the larger implications for all Americans:

“The White House wants its actions viewed solely through the lens of immigration, but they pose a broader threat to the due process rights and basic liberties and freedoms of everyone in America, noncitizens and citizens alike.

…due process matters as a cornerstone of fairness and justice and is not a mere legal technicality. It mandates that no individual, including noncitizens in the United States, be deprived of life, liberty or property without a fair and just process. It is enshrined in the Constitution as a safeguard against arbitrary executive power … The Trump administration has used its first few months to target the due process rights of immigrants. If left unchecked, its efforts will threaten the broader rights and liberties of us all.”

The full op-ed is worth reading, including the reminders that those being detained and potentially or actually deported include graduate students protesting about Gaza and supposed gang members who, as Leopold writes, turn out to be “a makeup artist, a professional soccer player and asylum seekers who are not Venezuelan gang members but nonetheless appear to have been swept up in this administration’s dragnet.”

Then read the comments from White House advisor and anti-immigrant architect Stephen Miller, who tweeted this weekend regarding the lack of due process (emphasis added): “If every foreign trespasser gets to have their own federal trial prior to removal then there is no liberation. There is no restoration. The invasion will be made complete.”

• “Restoration” to what? As Vanessa Cárdenas of America’s Voice told the New York Times this weekend about the Trump administration’s different treatment of white Afrikaner refugees compared to other refugee populations: “There’s no subtext and nothing subtle about the way this administration’s immigration and refugee policy has obvious racial and racist overtones … While they seek to single out Afrikaners for special treatment, they simultaneously want us to think mostly Black and brown vetted newcomers are dangerous despite their background checks and all evidence to the contrary.”
• Regarding Miller’s use of “invasion,” read new El Paso Matters reporting based on the first extended interview with the defense attorney for the El Paso Walmart shooter that details the shooter “believed he was acting at the direction of President Donald Trump when he murdered 23 people and wounded 22 others at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 … ‘He thought he had to stop the invasion because that’s what his president was telling him, which is just not rational,’ defense attorney Joe Spencer said in his first extended interview about the mass shooting that … [the shooter said] was meant to stop ‘the Hispanic invasion of Texas. ‘He thought, if he doesn’t do it, then nobody’s going to do it. He’s got to start.’”

Read David Leopold’s Washington Post op-ed, “Trump’s immigrant purge is part of a larger agenda”