Readers Write: Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes letters from readers online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

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President Donald Trump is ignoring the courts’ orders, placing us in a constitutional crisis. If he can deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador without due process, he can deport anyone. If he can ignore one court order, he can ignore all of them. He becomes king, with the other two branches of government irrelevant. It is hard to sort through all the daily outrages of this administration, but this truly is the issue of our time. The courts, Democrats and any remaining GOP leaders who don’t want to viewed as complicit in the eyes of history need to step up and stand strong. The media and the public must also raise their voices loudly and consistently.

The crisis is happening now.

Pamela J. Snopl, Minneapolis

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The news coverage about Abrego Garcia has been quite biased in his favor and against the Trump administration (“Trump officials must testify about wrongly deported man, judge rules,” April 16). The coverage has implied, as the headline stated, that he was “wrongly deported.” That isn’t quite true. It also quotes activists chanting outside a courtroom that they want “due process.”

An immigration judge had shielded him from deportation to El Salvador because he claimed he was in danger from gangs there. So, he shouldn’t have been deported to El Salvador, but the administration had every right to deport him overall. Unbiased reporting would make that clear.

James Brandt, New Brighton

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The silence from the high quarters of the American Bar Association (ABA) about the trampling of the law by Trump and his minions is disappointingly deafening.

The Trump administration couldn’t care less about what that organization says or does; in fact, Attorney General Pam Bondi has directed her underlings to withdraw from membership and cease any involvement with it.

With the annual Law Day commemoration coming up in a couple of weeks, May 1, it’s a good time now for the ABA to come forward, unless it, like a growing number of so-called elite, prestigious law firms, is cowering in fear.

Marshall Tanick, Minneapolis

The writer is a Twin Cities constitutional law attorney and former bar organization official.

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In his timely opinion piece titled “The ‘fabric of our Constitution’ is fraying,” columnist John Rash said that America’s course correction away from authoritarianism “will require resolute courts.” With his numerous appeals of lower court decisions to the Supreme Court, Trump is hoping that his assaults on the rule of law will not be overturned. If that conservatively oriented court (two-thirds of whose members were nominated by Republican presidents — one-third by Trump himself) proves to be as supine as the Republican-dominated Congress, then our nation’s transition from a semi-democracy to a pseudo-democracy is complete.

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In 1945, 22 ranking members of the Nazi Party stood trial at Nuremberg. Their charges were read, and each defendant was given the opportunity to answer for their crimes against humanity in a court of law.

In March 2025, more than 200 migrants were summarily rendered to El Salvador without due process, one in direct contravention of an order for withholding of removal. The Republican administration has since announced their intentions to exile “homegrown” American citizens with no legal recourse, with the administration’s Homeland Security adviser declaring that deportation awaits for “anyone who preaches hate for America.”

Due process for all persons is a right enshrined by the Fifth and 14th Amendments, and it applies to citizens and noncitizens alike. When due process is abandoned, we get “administrative errors” such as the one described above. When combined with viewpoint-based deportation of citizens and the rollback of civil liberties more generally, we shred the fabric of law that underlies a just and ordered society, and risk committing the “administrative errors” for which the Nazis were prosecuted and convicted.

In light of this, our Republican leaders should be asked to explain why they believe the architects of the Holocaust had a stronger claim to due process than the individuals illegally rendered to serve life sentences at the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. I’d certainly be interested in hearing their responses.

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The Constitution prohibits the government from depriving any person of liberty without due process of law. Yet the Trump administration claims the power to send Abrego Garcia and hundreds of others to a Salvadoran prison without any due process and, in Abrego Garcia’s case, in violation of a court order prohibiting his deportation there. Incredibly, the Trump administration now is refusing to follow a Supreme Court order directing the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.

The Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, yet the Trump administration sent masked agents to seize and imprison a Tufts student and cancel her student visa because she wrote an opinion article critical of Israel.

The Constitution grants the power of the purse to Congress, yet the Trump administration claims the unilateral power to destroy government agencies and programs that were established and funded by law.

The Constitution grants Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations. Yet the Trump administration claims the power to ignore existing trade agreements and laws (including one negotiated by Trump himself!) and impose economywide tariffs on more than 160 countries without any action by Congress, by declaring an “emergency” under a statute that’s never been used to impose tariffs before (and the “emergency” apparently comes and goes on Trump’s whim).

And the Trump administration’s attacks on universities and attempts to destroy law firms Trump doesn’t like likewise violate the freedom of speech and due-process rights of those institutions. We have never seen such a wholesale attack on the Constitution and the rule of law in our nation’s history. You can be for the Constitution and the rule of law, or you can be for Trump and support further steps toward one-man rule. It’s one or the other. Let’s all stand up as best we can, regardless of party, for the Constitution and the rule of law.

Tom Vitt, Minneapolis