slate - This is a Constitutional Crisis
Trump Has Suspended Due Process for Muslims in America.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/01/28/trump_has_suspended_due_process_for_muslims.html
by Mark Joseph Stern
The United States government is certain that Haider Sameer Abdulkhaleq Alshawi does not pose a security threat to the country. That’s why it granted Alshawi, an Iraqi, a visa to come to America and join his wife and children, who had already fled and resettled in Texas. (In Iraq, Alshawi’s family members were victims of an attempted kidnapping and a car bombing because Alshawi’s wife worked for a U.S. contractor.) On Friday, Alshawi boarded a flight to New York’s JFK airport. While he was in the air, Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting Iraqi refugees from entering the country. When Alshawi’s plane landed, reports the New York Times, agents from Customs and Border Protection boarded it and took him into custody. They prohibited Alshawi from contacting his attorneys, who were waiting for him at the airport. The attorneys asked a CBP agent who they should speak to in order to help their client.
“Mr. President,” a CBP agent responded. “Call Mr. Trump.”
As of Saturday afternoon, Alshawi is still being detained at JFK. He is one of multiple refugees—the government won’t say how many there are—with valid documents who is nevertheless being held at an airport. Trump’s expansive executive order prevents refugees, migrants, and even green-card holders from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. (Reuters reports that green-card holders may be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.) The government’s interpretation of the order has led to the immediate and indefinite detention of people who, until yesterday, had every right to come into the country.
There are serious constitutional problems with Trump’s executive order as a whole, including its preference for one particular religion (Christianity) and its denigration of another (Islam). The courts will debate these questions over the coming months. But for Alshawi and others like him, there is a more immediate concern: a complete and total lack of due process. As a chilling American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed Saturday demonstrates, Trump’s executive order has led to the flagrantly unconstitutional detention of perfectly legal immigrants whose lone crime is their national origin and religion. It is not just morally wrong. It is illegal.
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