The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
A new poll finds that by a yawning margin, Americans believe people should get due process of law before being ejected from the United States — but advocates say they’ve sometimes been denied it in Ohio.
President Donald Trump is clashing with the courts over what detainees are legally entitled to as Immigration and Customs Enforcement rounds up people it believes are undocumented and takes them overseas.
A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ruled that eight migrants sent to the violence-torn country of South Sudan were not given a meaningful chance to contest the deportations on the grounds that they would be put in danger. Only one of the individuals is from South Sudan.
The administration deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador even though a court issued an order forbidding it. The U.S. Supreme Court has subsequently ruled that the administration cannot deport people without giving them due process.
Most people of all ages and partisan affiliations believe that’s the proper course.
A poll released Tuesday by the Bullfinch Group and the National Immigration Forum gave respondents a brief definition of due process. Then they were asked whether they supported or opposed requiring due process before deporting people.
Sixty-three percent said they supported doing so, 23% were opposed, and 14% were undecided. That’s a 40-point margin in favor of due process.
Democrats supported due process for people facing deportation by a 81-11 margin. Independents supported it by a 59-23 margin. For Republicans, it was 51-35.
In other words, the closest margin was 16 points.
The poll surveyed 1,200 adults between May 9 and 13.
“Due process is essential to keeping American communities safe and immigration processes orderly,” Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said in a written statement. “This bedrock American value protects all of us.”
Even so, not all detainees have received due process in Ohio, said Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance.
Last month, her group got an attorney for a man who’d gotten a final order of deportation. The jail where the man was held wouldn’t allow the attorney to visit the man on less than a week’s notice, Tramonte said.
“All of a sudden, the night before the attorney visit, he’s gone,” she said. “This was weeks before his scheduled deportation, so this is a clear indication that they wanted to get him out quickly because they knew he was getting a lawyer to fight his case.”
Tramonte added, “It’s just not fair. The government has attorneys in every immigration case — in the courtroom — every single time. The immigrant deserves to have an attorney by their side, too.”
Tramonte didn’t give the man’s name or nationality to protect his identity.
Most Americans appear to agree that such treatment is unfair, and unwise.
A poll also conducted by the Bullfinch Group and the National Immigration Forum in December found that Americans overwhelmingly think that deportations should focus on immigrants who commit violent crime, that the persecuted should be protected, and that families should be kept intact.
The Trump administration’s continued harsh treatment of immigrants might be costing it in the court of public opinion.
An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in late April found that immigration remained Trump’s strongest issue. Even so, more Americans disapproved of the job he was doing in that arena than approved — 53% to 46%.
There also appeared to be little appetite for Trump to take measures on immigration that are even more sweeping. Forty-eight percent of respondents said that Trump had gone too far on immigration, 32% said his approach had been about right and just 18% said he hadn’t gone far enough.
Murray of the National Immigration Forum said people want the Trump administration to follow the law.
“Americans do not want our immigration system to undermine the rule of law,” she said. “We look forward to working with leaders on approaches that uphold fairness and due process.”
