Date: Aug 28, 2025
Dear LAWGista,
A friend recently gave me a bumper sticker. It reads, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
“I never thought we’d ever need bumper stickers quoting the Fifth Amendment,” she remarked dismally as she handed it to me. She was, of course, lamenting the current state of our country.
Three days after his release from being unlawfully detained for 160 days in El Salvador and Tennessee, Kilmar Abrego García was again detained by ICE agents after a routine check-in with immigration officials earlier this week. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is now threatening to deport him to Uganda where he has no ties.
From the unconscionable harassment and detention of Americans of color, to the unlawful imprisonment and deportation of both documented and undocumented immigrants to the gulag CECOT in El Salvador, it is clear that due process is no longer a guarantee under the Trump Administration.
The assault on the rule of law here parallels that of El Salvador. The Bukele-controlled Legislative Assembly in El Salvador recently fast-tracked reforms to the Special Law Against Organized Crime without any public input or debate. The reforms deny the right to due process to the nearly 90,000 people who have been detained under the State of Exception. Under these new regulations, the Attorney General can indiscriminately extend pre-trial detentions while the country’s courts gear up to conduct “mass” or collective trials of up to 900 people at once. What’s more, the reforms lay the groundwork for increased sentences and even allow for some children to be tried as adults.
By the time they have their day in court, many of these individuals will have been jailed without seeing their families or loved ones for over five years.
When governments can detain anyone indefinitely without trial, when mass prosecutions replace individual justice, when constitutional protections become mere suggestions, we all become vulnerable.
This is why we cannot be silent. Contact your representatives. Support organizations defending due process. Share Kilmar’s story. Because in the fight against injustice, there are no bystanders—only those who resist and those who are complicit.
Together we shall continue fighting the good fight.
Adelante,
Vicki Gass
LAWG Executive Director
