Joe Rogan among conservative voices alarmed by Trump's immigration tactics

Washington: Influential figures on the right have largely cheered on the opening months of the Trump presidency. But as the administration has rushed to carry out deportations as quickly as possible, making mistakes and raising concerns about due process along the way, the unified front in favor of President Donald Trump’s immigration purge is beginning to crack.

When the administration deported a professional makeup artist and accused him of being part of a criminal gang, enormously popular podcaster Joe Rogan balked.

“You’ve got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting lassoed up and deported and sent to El Salvador prisons,” Rogan, who endorsed Trump, said on his show “The Joe Rogan Experience.” He added that the case was “horrific.”

When the administration arrested a former Columbia University graduate student who had been involved in campus protests, far-right commentator Ann Coulter questioned the move.

“There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport, but unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the First Amendment?” Coulter wrote on social media.

The dissenting voices, which have been limited mostly to commentators rather than elected Republicans, are remarkable because conservatives don’t often openly break with the president. And while the objections have largely been contained to tactics — not the overarching goal of ramping up deportations — the cracks show how seriously some conservatives are taking the administration’s aggressive and at times slapdash methods.

The administration has acknowledged it deported a Maryland man with protected legal status to a prison in El Salvador because of an “administrative error,” but said it now lacked the ability to have him released. It also has granted itself the authority to deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members on the basis of little more than whether they have tattoos or have worn clothing associated with the criminal organisation.

In one instance, a man who was deported was accused of having a crown tattoo that officials said proved his gang membership, but his lawyers said the tattoo was in honor of the man’s favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. Another migrant got a similar crown tattoo, the lawyers said, to commemorate the death of his grandmother.

A document used by the government to determine gang affiliations indicated officials could identify people as members of the Tren de Aragua gang based merely on their clothing, such as “high-end urban street wear” — especially basketball jerseys featuring the Chicago Bulls or their former star player, Michael Jordan.

“The overarching reality of this administration is that they’re trying to maximise removals — remove as many people as possible,” said David J. Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute and a former GOP aide on Capitol Hill. “That operating mode will lead to more mistakes, especially when you’re trying to evade judicial review of your decisions.”

Bier called the tattoos “astoundingly thin” evidence of gang membership.

“If it was ever presented to a court, it’d be laughed out of court,” he said.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, took aim at the media’s reporting on deportation cases Tuesday, accusing journalists of caring more about the due process rights of accused gang members than the victims of gang violence. She acknowledged a “clerical error” in the case of the Maryland man who was deported, but said that the administration would continue with its policies.

“These are vicious criminals. This is a vicious gang,” she said. “I wish that the media would spend just a second of the same time you have spent trying to litigate each and every individual of this gang who has been deported from this country as the innocent Americans whose lives have been lost at the hands of these brutal criminals. We maintain our position and very strongly so.”

Trump signed an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in order to target Tren de Aragua by claiming the gang was carrying out an “invasion” of the United States. A federal judge has halted the administration’s plan to use the law to deport people without a hearing, but not before hundreds of migrants flown out of the country headed to notorious prisons in El Salvador.

Andrew C. McCarthy, a conservative former prosecutor, made the case in National Review that it was time for the president to “abandon the ill-conceived attempt to deport alleged Venezuelan gangbangers under the Alien Enemy Act,” arguing that the administration should shift to more solid legal ground and use traditional federal immigration laws to carry out deportations.

“The Trump administration has done a commendable job reversing the incentives for ‘migrants’ to try to come to America,” McCarthy wrote. “That is a boon for our security and domestic tranquility. It also has a variety of humanitarian benefits for the migrants themselves. The president, however, may not just kick out of the country people whose presence here displeases him. We are a nation of laws, not men.”

While some conservatives have spoken out, few elected Republicans have done so. The Republican mayor of Springfield, Ohio, told Newsweek that abrupt deportations were harmful to his community, but GOP members of Congress have largely cheered on Trump’s moves.

Asked Tuesday about mistakes made during deportations and a lack of due process, Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the majority leader, contended that most Americans agree with Trump’s objective.

“I’m not familiar with the particulars of that individual case,” he said, adding that “the president is correct” to make sure that immigrants “who have been arrested for crimes in this country, be sent back to their home country.”

Bier, who once worked on Capitol Hill for one of the founding members of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, said influential figures on the right were raising concerns about a lack of due process because a core principle is at stake.

“We’re talking about doing something extraordinary here for the government to sentence people to what’s essentially slave labor, torture, prison in El Salvador based on nothing, based on having a flower tattoo,” he said. “Once we get in the neighborhood of getting rid of due process, that’s the thing that protects all of our citizenship rights.