Raskin: Abrego Garcia Case Isn’t About ‘One Individual’ I’ve Called ‘Marylander’ Father of Kid with Disabilities

On Monday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) responded to a question on if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the right person to be focusing on by saying that “due process is not about one case or one individual.”

Host Jake Tapper asked, “Your Texas colleague, Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar, recently said, ‘This is not the right issue to talk about due process. … This is not the right person to be saying that we need to bring him back to the United States[,]’ because, I suspect, the fact that Abrego Garcia, his wife, accused him, in a police report, of beating her, and, obviously, there are questions — although not proven in a court of law, that I know — about his membership in MS-13. Does Cuellar have a point here, that, if you’re going to be talking about this, maybe due process and maybe Abrego Garcia are not really what you want to be focusing on?”

Raskin responded, “Well, due process is not about one case or one individual. There are some people who were saying Donald Trump should not have had due process when he ended up being convicted of 34 criminal felonies. But, of course, he had a right to due process, a right to counsel, a right to hear the evidence against him, a right to adduce his own evidence, a right to make closing arguments. And Justice Scalia was emphatic about the fact that both citizens and non-citizens have a right to due process. So, that’s just a categorical constitutional principle. We don’t decide to turn people’s constitutional rights on or off, depending on whether or not we like them or whether we think they might be found guilty.”

Back in April, Raskin referredto Abrego Garcia as “a Marylander, married to a US citizen who [has] a 5-year-old son with autism.” And “a Marylander, the husband of a U.S. citizen, and the father of a U.S. citizen child with disabilities.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett