ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

— Sen. Josh Hawley

“He is a hardened criminal. So, they can deport him because he is deportable. This is how ridiculous all this is.�

— Sen. Eric Schmitt

Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt both have law degrees. Both have held the position of Missouri attorney general, representing their state in court. Both are now U.S. senators, a job that inevitably entails deep engagement with legal issues.

Is it remotely possible that either of these men doesn’t understand the simple two-word concept of “due process�?

The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is in fact “absurd� and “ridiculous,� to quote Missouri’s two esteemed senators, but not for the reasons they would have their Fox News audiences believe.

It’s absurd and ridiculous that Hawley and Schmitt, like virtually all their Republican colleagues in Congress, are running interference for a Trump administration stunt that ultimately isn’t about one immigrant, but is about undermining the entire concept of due process and court oversight. President Donald Trump believes he is beholden to neither.

A Salvadoran national, Abrego Garcia was sent to the U.S. by his family in 2012, at age 16, to escape recruitment by that country’s gangs. In the ensuing years he has married an American woman in Maryland, fathered and raised a son and been employed as a union sheet metal worker.

He originally entered the country as an undocumented migrant but, like many undocumented migrants, he has for years interacted constructively with the American court and immigration systems. A judge ruled in 2019 that he could not be deported to El Salvador because of the continuing threat to his life from the gangs there. Since then, he has regularly checked in with immigration officials.

Contrary to both Missouri senators’ inflammatory rhetoric, there’s no evidence Abrego Garcia is (in Schmitt’s words) a “hardened criminal.� In fact, he has never been convicted of any crime, in the U.S. or El Salvador.

Yet Abrego Garcia last month was stopped while driving with his 5-year-old son and summarily shipped out of the U.S. to a Salvadoran maximum security prison on allegations he is a gang member. This was in direct defiance of the earlier court order that specifically barred him from being deported to that specific country.

Abrego Garcia is among more than 200 migrants recently sent to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison as putative gang members, without hearings provided to prove those allegations. Such hearings are the definition of due process, which is supposed to apply to even undocumented immigrants.

Many of the deportations were reportedly based on nothing more than tattoos that immigration officials may have misinterpreted as gang symbols. That’s what happens when due process goes out the window.

What makes Abrego Garcia different from the other deportees is that the administration, in an apparent fit of uncharacteristic honesty, acknowledged in court that he was mistakenly scooped up in the deportation net due to an “administrative error,� and that there was actually no legal justification for sending him to El Salvador at all — let alone to a prison there.

It’s a mistake that wouldn’t have happened had Abrego Garcia been afforded due process in the first place. But at least once due process finally was afforded, the courts righted the error. A federal judge ruled that the administration had to bring Abrego Garcia back; the Supreme Court confirmed the order.

And the Trump administration responded, in essence, Sorry, no can do.

The administration’s argument — that it is legally powerless to return Abrego Garcia from a foreign prison where he was sent in direct defiance of a court order, under a paid contract between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments — is so inherently unbelievable that it can’t rationally be anything other than a thumbed nose at the courts.

In case that nose-thumbing didn’t come through clearly enough, there was the recent, chilling spectacle of Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele all but smirking for the cameras about their supposed joint inability to unwind this court-defying miscarriage of justice.

Schmitt’s defense of this indefensible stunt is especially tortured. In a , he stressed that Abrego Garcia is “deportable� to any country other than El Salvador. That’s accurate but irrelevant, because he was in fact deported (again, in defiance of a judge) to a prison in El Salvador. Since Schmitt at least appears to understand the obvious illegality here, where is his outrage?

This case is part of a wider campaign by this administration to set aside the entire concept of due process — and not just for alleged migrant gang members. Here in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ region, student visa holders accused of minor traffic violations, or nothing at all, are being detained and deported. Trump has even cracked the door to using his foreign-prison loophole against Americans.

If and when Trump finally just plainly says what he plainly believes — that he isn’t bound by due process or any rule-of-law restraints — the courts will be powerless to stop him. Only Congress will be able to rein him in. That that duty will fall to the likes of Hawley and Schmitt isn’t merely absurd or ridiculous, but terrifying.