Secretary of State Marco Rubio forgot the Gospel According to Donald Trump on Sunday by admitting that anyone on U.S. soil is entitled to a fair hearing before being removed from the country.
“Yes, of course,” Rudio said in response to the host’s question of whether the Fifth Amendment still applies under Trump during his morning interview with MSNBC. “That’s what the law says!”
Perhaps conscious of having contradicted the latest White House statements and directives on the matter, he then scrambled to tell the network that “if you’re in this country illegally, you have no right to be here and you must be removed.”
“Somehow over the last 20 years, we’ve completely lost this notion, or somehow completely adopted this idea, that, yes, we have immigration laws, but once you come into our country illegally, it triggers all kinds of rights that can keep you here indefinitely,” he said.
On April 21st, the Republican president posted to Truth Social that “we cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” contravening the Constitution’s 233-year-old provisions that “no person shall be […] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Earlier on Friday, a leaked copy of official guidance from Attorney General Pam Bondi also revealed federal authorities are now permitted to enter the homes of suspected gang members without obtaining a warrant.
Rubio’s comments come as scandal continues to mount over the illegal removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland dad-of-one, to his home country of El Salvador as well as Friday’s deportation of three U.S.-born children ages seven, four, and two from Louisiana to Honduras.
MSNBC host Kristen Welker asked Rubio whether the removal of those citizens violated their right to due process, to which he responded by describing coverage of the case as “misleading.”
“The children went with their mothers,” he said. “If those children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States with their father, or someone here who wants to assume them.”
The Washington Post, which first covered the story on Saturday, reported that in the two-year-old’s case, lawyers representing the child’s father had filed an emergency petition on Thursday seeking her release only for the man’s daughter to be flown out of the country before the court convened the following morning.
“You guys make it sound like ICE agents kicked down the door and grabbed the two-year-old and threw him on an airplane,” Rubio said. “That’s misleading, that’s just not true!”
The newspaper also reports that both families were taken into custody during a routine check-in as part of a supervision program, but were nevertheless prevented by immigration officials from communicating with relatives or legal representatives before being deported on Friday.
The four-year-old in question is understood to be suffering from stage four cancer and to have been left without access to medication or medical care by the abrupt removal from their country of birth.
“I don’t know how much more of a blatant or clear constitutional violation there can be than deporting U.S. citizens without due process,” Alanah Odoms, executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told WaPo.
“Especially with some of those citizens being the most vulnerable of all vulnerable children,” she added. “Not just any children, children with medical conditions that are dire.”
The post Marco Rubio Contradicts Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi on Due Process appeared first on The Daily Beast.
