Fox News host Brian Kilmeade says undocumented immigrants “don’t deserve” due process.
“There’s 22 million people here at minimum, illegal already, just in the last three administrations,” Kilmeade said on Fox & Friends Monday. “If we are going to give these guys a day in court and a lawyer—we can’t do it, they don’t deserve it.”
Kilmeade added that recognizing constitutional rights just isn’t realistic.
“It’s not practical to think that we can do due process on 8 million people,” he added.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution says that the government cannot “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property” without due process. But the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 allows the president to detain and deport foreign nationals during a time of war.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump invoked the act—which was used during World War II to lock up more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps—to deport dozens of Venezuelan migrants without questioning.
Co-host Lawrence Jones agreed, adding that the United States should “revisit” the constitutional rights it affords to foreigners residing in the country.
“You have a constitutional right that is ... afforded to illegals in this country—we should revisit that,“ Jones said. ”But then you have a competing act that is saying, ‘Hey, if someone is a part of a foreign terrorist organization, you don’t have to give them due process.‘"
Last week, the Trump administration defied a court order to deport 238 migrants it said were members of Venezuela’s feared Tren de Aragua gang to a “megaprison” in El Salvador.
Despite assurances that the migrants were members of the gang, at least two of the men deported were innocent bystanders who had legally applied for asylum.
One of the men was deported for having a tattoo of soccer team Real Madrid, which was wrongfully identified as a gang tattoo, while another was accused of flashing gang signs in a photograph—in fact, the gesture means “I love you” in sign language.
