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Stand for the Constitution: Due Process, Right to Trial, No Cruelty
Copyright © 2025 by Ari Armstrong
April 17, 2025
Call to Action
Friends,
Last night I watched CBS's report on the U.S. government's imprisonment of people, without due process, without trial, and with extreme cruelty, in the El Salvadoran prison. I urge you to watch it.
After tossing in bed in anguish last night, I resolved to write everyone I can think of, including elected officials and media sites, urging people to Stand for the Constitution and help stop the U.S. government's wrongful imprisonment of people in a foreign concentration camp.
As Americans we all have a moral responsibility to speak out against this atrocity. If you voted for Trump, despite the clear warnings of his authoritarian leanings, that goes doubly for you.
Don't be bamboozled by the false choice of concentration camps versus unpoliced immigration. There's a huge difference between deporting someone to that person's home country and imprisoning the person indefinitely in a hellish foreign concentration camp. If someone commits a violent crime on U.S. soil, that person properly is prosecuted and, if convicted, imprisoned according to law.
The U.S. government literally is "disappearing" people. That puts the lives and liberty of all of us at risk.
I hope you'll take whatever actions you can to Stand for the Constitution. Maybe that means writing your elected officials, or sending a letter to your local paper, or speaking out on social media, or joining a march, or donating to a civil-rights organization, or all of those things and more.
Whatever you can do, do it now, for the sake of our children's liberty.
Thank you,
Ari Armstrong
P.S. For those who need a reminder, following are relevant sections of the Bill of Rights at stake:
4. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated. . . .
5. No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. . . .
6. In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial. . . . and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; [and] to be confronted with the witnesses against him. . . .
8. Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Creeping Fascism
Let us not mince words here. Donald Trump and his administration have sent hundreds of people without due process to a foreign gulag, in violation of the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments, a concentration camp where people are systematically abused and tortured. The United States Supreme Court unanimously directed Trump to have one of these men returned, and Trump has flat-out refused. Moreover, Trump has repeatedly threatened to send U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to the same torture-prison in El Salvador. This is what fascism looks like. Speak up now, before it is too late.
I wrote the paragraph above for one of my recent email newsletters. I also posted the following notes to Bluesky:
We're a hair's breadth away from the president unilaterally declaring U.S. citizens to be "terrorists" or "enemies of the state" and sending them to foreign gulags without trial. Such things always are impossible until they aren't.
One morning my nine-year-old urged me not to criticize the Trump administration because he doesn't want me to be "taken away." I explained the chances of that are low, and we reduce the hold of tyranny, not by being afraid and silent, as would-be tyrants want, but by being courageous and outspoken.
Deportation Notes
Perfect Lawlessness: Andy Craig: "Trump's El Salvador scheme is more than just flouting American constitutional law. It repudiates the fundamental principle of due process with roots dating back four millennia. It is, as a Reagan-appointed judge on the Fourth Circuit searingly put it, 'a path of perfect lawlessness.'" . . . We are staring into the abyss. Any person, citizen or not, can now be shipped off to a gulag from which they have no hope of release, no opportunity for judicial review, no protection of any law."
A Longer-Term Objective: Walter Olson: "The Trump administration could simply have brought Garcia home. . . . Had the Trump administration simply been seeking short-term goodwill with the public, it would surely have taken this easy way out. That it did not suggests that it was instead building toward a longer-term objective it saw as more important. . . . The point of the wink-wink buddy act between Trump and Bukele is to effectuate what we should reasonably assume has been Trump's objective all along: to create an offshore zone in which persons of Trump's choosing can be whisked out of the United States and taken to a place of detention."
Brutal and Lawless: Noah Smith: "Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. . . . This is brutal and lawless behavior—the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that's common in authoritarian regimes."