Due Process

Or is it Duration of Process?

When the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), left-leaning members of the judiciary, and Democratic politicians invoke the principle of "due process" in the context of illegal immigration, it is critical to understand the specific and strategic meaning they assign to the term. Their interpretation often has less to do with ensuring justice in any traditional sense and more to do with leveraging delay and institutional fatigue as political weapons. The ultimate goal is not the fair application of immigration law, but rather the slow erosion of those laws through procedural exhaustion.

We have seen this strategy deployed effectively in the realm of capital punishment. Death row cases routinely stretch on for decades, not because of genuine uncertainty about guilt or innocence, but because of a steady stream of appeals on every conceivable ground—from allegations of racial bias to claims of mental instability. The case of Raymond Riles provides a telling example. Convicted in 1974 of the brutal murder of John Thomas Henry, Riles spent over 45 years on death row in Texas before his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The facts of the crime were never in doubt; yet through decades of litigation centered on mental health concerns, the death penalty was essentially abandoned in his case—not through a decisive act of law or executive mercy, but through endless delay.

This is the same model the American left envisions for illegal immigration cases. President Biden’s administration, through policy decisions and executive inaction, presided over an unprecedented surge in illegal border crossings, month after month, for nearly the entirety of his term. This was not a coincidence. It was a calculated move to overwhelm the immigration courts, making the processing of deportation cases so burdensome and drawn out that the nation’s capacity to enforce its own immigration laws would collapse under the strain. Only when polling data signaled electoral danger did the administration even attempt to modulate the pace of illegal entries.

The left’s strategy is to entangle the system in an endless cycle of appeals, motions, and technical challenges. Each delay serves to strengthen the argument that deporting someone who has now lived in the U.S. for years would be inhumane or unjust. Thus, by deliberately stretching out the process, activists aim to create de facto permanent residence for millions who entered the country illegally, culminating eventually in formal amnesty.

It is crucial to recognize that the due process cited by the left in these cases is not a genuine safeguard of individual rights, but a tactical weapon deployed to subvert national immigration policy through exhaustion. Justice, in the traditional sense, demands both fairness and finality. A system that cannot reach final decisions because it is mired in endless litigation is not a just system; it is a system paralyzed by political manipulation.

Americans must be vigilant in distinguishing between the authentic pursuit of justice and the strategic abuse of judicial processes intended to achieve political objectives through sheer attrition.