More: The legal fig leaf Trump used to deport Kilmar brego Garca to a brutal Salvadoran prison is a law from 1798 called the Enemy Aliens Act, signed by President John Adams after being passed by a Congress controlled by a political party so old it no longer exists.
The Declaration of Independence was barely over 20 years old then. You'll remember that document from grade school, but you probably don't know that it accuses a British tyrant of misruling America in exactly the same way Trump is.
"The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States."
The document goes on to list King George's many crimes that happen to exactly match Trump's depredations. Among them:
"Depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury" " Garcia was deported without even a hearing by a judge, let alone a jury.
"Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences" " Garcia was deported to a foreign nation based on a mere accusation never proved in court.
"Abolishing the free System of English Laws" " Trump could only do those things by ignoring common law.
Trump is as guilty as the tyrant King George of "abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments."
They both are guilty of "declaring themselves invested with power to legislate."
But Trump is not just the kind of lawless autocrat who inspired the American Revolution, the values of which formed the basis of our Constitution. He has ignored the very first civil right that is older than the Roman Empire, nearly as old as the Pyramids, as old as the idea of law itself. And that is the right to have the government's case against you taken before a magistrate who must agree before your life is destroyed. That idea is in the code of Hammurabi from 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.
If Donald Trump can deport a man " in a case which the administration admitted was an "administrative error" " without the case against that man being heard in court, there is nothing to prevent him from using the same process to deport and imprison U.S. citizens without trial. Trump has even said that he is thinking about deporting American convicts to this same Salvadoran prison hellhole.
