To the people saying that migrants don’t deserve due process if it turns out they got in illegally:
1) In order to determine whether they are here illegally, there has to be an investigation; we don’t get to just grab people off the streets and throw them onto airplanes and send them to prisons.
2) Let’s say they do turn out to be here illegally, and/or have committed a crime etc.. They still have rights.
If criminals don’t have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and voilà, those people will no longer have rights.
It’s what every tyrannical government in all of history has done. This is why people who break the law still need to have due process.
Due process may sound messy and inconvenient, and may even sound wrong. But think about it.
Due process FOR ALL protects all of us against capricious and tyrannical government — the kind of tyranny that our founding fathers set out to safeguard against. Which is why due process FOR ALL is enshrined in the Constitution.
(Yes, in case you might be wondering, this is still an environmentally focused blog. The environment is not something that can just be picked out as a separate issue. Tyranny and the carceral industrial complex have an unacceptably high ecological cost on top of the other problematic aspects.)
PS. Regarding the political climate in general — I actually think things have been taking a downward turn at least since 911. People in the USA started to be willing to trade liberties for what they perceived as “security.” We got beefed-up militarization and policing. I don’t feel more secure, and I think probably a lot of other people don’t either.