In 2002, Ahmed Rabbani was working as a taxi driver in Karachi when he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities. They beat him with wire and sticks and accused him of being “a wanted terrorist called Hassan Ghul.” The Pakistani government then sold Rabbani to the CIA for a $5,000 bounty. Rabbani thought he could easily explain to the Americans that “this was all a case of mistaken identity,” later saying he had “expected justice immediately.” He could not have been more mistaken.

The CIA did not release Rabbani. Instead, they took him to a secret “black site” and tortured him more. (The euphemistic term “enhanced interrogation,” borrowed from the Nazis, was used internally to describe the techniques.) It was a “house of horrors” where “one interrogator would begin his conversations with Rabbani by extinguishing cigarettes on his skin.” Pushed to his limit, Rabbani confessed to everything his torturers demanded. (This was the same way the infamous 1930s Soviet show trials got confessions out of the defendants.) He later described what the U.S. did to him: 

I have withstood a lot of torture. […] [M]y hands were shackled overhead for days on end. Do you have any idea how painful that is, with your shoulders gradually dislocating? Maybe you read in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report about the prisoner who tried to cut off his own hand to end the pain. That was me. Torture makes you go mad.

Rabbani was eventually transferred to the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp, along with his brother, where for the next 20 years he tried desperately to prove his innocence and escape the Kafkaesque nightmare he had been plunged into. He went on repeated hunger strikes to protest his imprisonment, nearly starving himself to death. By 2018, he had become completely despondent. Insisting that “the only battle I ever fought back home, as a taxi driver in Karachi, was the rush hour traffic,” he lamented that “the world has forgotten me,” and admitted that “when someone says, ‘Good morning,’ I do not respond anymore. There is no morning and no evening. There is only despair.”

Rabbani was finally released in 2023, by then a middle-aged man with a long graying beard. The New York Times noted that “It is unclear why [the Rabbani brothers] had remained in prison.” They had never been convicted of, or even charged with, a crime. Nobody was ever held accountable for what was done to Rabbani.

I retell this horrifying story to illustrate a simple point, which is what can go wrong when the executive branch is allowed to subvert the basic principle of due process of law, to deem anyone it likes a “terrorist” and thereby exempt them from the basic human rights protections afforded to others. To allow the government to suspend constitutional guarantees of fair treatment makes it possible to inflict the most nightmarish ordeals on perfectly innocent people. It is a recipe for extreme injustice.

The depressing, outrageous story of Guantanamo should have taught an enduring lesson: it is critically important to provide due process rights, even to those the government accuses of being “terrorists,” in part because the executive branch cannot be trusted to correctly identify who is a terrorist and who is not. Due process rights include a presumption of innocence, notice of the actual charges a person is facing, and a chance to contest those charges in front of a neutral judge. The central principle here is that if the government wants to punish you for something you did, it is incumbent upon them to prove that you actually did it and for them to give you a chance to provide evidence that you did not do what you are accused of having done.

I realize this is basic middle school civics stuff. It doesn’t exactly require a law degree to grasp. And yet everyone in this country could use a refresher on due process, because the Trump administration is currently trying to convince Americans that when it deems people terrorists, it has the right to deport them without ever having to prove they committed, planned, or even contemplated any acts of terror. 

This magazine has already discussed the case of Mahmoud Khalil. A permanent U.S. resident who has never been convicted of any crime, Khalil is currently in immigration detention awaiting deportation. The Trump administration does not think it has to prove that Khalil did commit a crime. In fact, the deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security admitted to NPR that Khalil was targeted for “basically pro-Palestinian activity.” This is squarely in violation of the First Amendment, of course, but also the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees due process of law. The reason for the guarantee of due process is straightforward: without a procedure in which the government must prove its claims, there is no way for an innocent person to prove they have been wrongfully accused.

Now, the Trump administration is facing criticism for another unlawful deportation action in which it sent hundreds of Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador. A federal judge had ordered the administration not to follow through with the deportation. The Trump administration simply ignored the judge, called for his impeachment, and sent the migrants anyway (“Oopsie… too late,” said the authoritarian president of El Salvador). This has put the U.S. on the brink of a constitutional crisis. 

There has been plenty of criticism of Trump’s flouting of judicial authority. Even Chief Justice John Roberts publicly rejected Trump’s demand to impeach the judge. But I want to dwell on the argument that the Trump administration and its defenders are making to rationalize the deportations. They are saying that the administration has the right to deport those it deems a danger, and that by “defending” the migrants, Democrats and the left clearly want violent gang members in the country. “These heinous monsters were extracted and removed to El Salvador where they will no longer be able to pose any threat to the American people,” said White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “Are Illegal Alien Terrorists Entitled to Due Process?” asked Ward Clark of the conservative website Red State. 

To this, I would answer: of course, for reasons that should be obvious from recalling Rabbani’s case. How do you have any idea who actually is a “terrorist” if you don’t have a court proceeding? What if they’re not? What chance do they have to disprove it? Families of some deportees have insisted that they are not gang members, and many appear to have no criminal records. One appears to be an innocent restaurant worker who has now been disappeared into a brutal Salvadoran mega-prison. The Trump administration has already repeatedly deported U.S. citizens. 

The Trump administration claims it is delivering “justice to terrorists.” First, note that the administration is deliberately redefining ordinary street crime as “terrorism.” National Security Advisor Mike Waltz has said they are pursuing a “wholesale shift on what a terrorist is and how they should be treated in the United States,” a view that can easily lead to the conclusion that the state would be justified if it wanted to conduct extrajudicial executions on U.S. soil of anyone deemed a terrorist.

But I don’t think the administration even cares whether the people it is capturing are really “terrorists.” Steve Bannon likely speaks for a lot of Republicans when he shrugs off the possibility of entirely innocent people being swept up: “If there's some innocent gardeners in there? Hey, tough break for a swell guy.” There is a strong element of racism here, as there was with the indifference to Guantanamo prisoners. When it came to his own criminal conviction, Bannon was deeply concerned with getting a fair legal procedure. But poor migrants? Meh, if their lives are ruined, well, that’s a “tough break.” Likewise, both Democratic and Republican politicians have been cruelly indifferent to the fate of Guantanamo prisoners for 20 years, and while nobody said aloud “I don’t care about Ahmed Rabbani because he is a poor taxi driver from Karachi,” it’s hard to avoid concluding that that is an important reason why his desperate pleas didn’t get heard more widely. Islamophobia is rampant in this country, and it is bipartisan. 

“I don’t believe members of a Venezuelan terrorist organization [here] illegally should receive the same due process as American citizens,” I saw someone say online. Well, first, every time you hear this, remember that due process is the way to find out whether someone is a member of a terrorist organization or is here illegally, so even under this theory, you can’t actually know who deserves the due process until you provide due process. But second, remember that the word “terrorism” is used constantly by authoritarian governments to justify eroding basic civil liberties, and it is far better to provide civil liberties to everyone than to give the government wide license to determine who gets them and who doesn’t. 

The easiest argument to make for due process is that you should fight to protect it because someday you may want it yourself. If you are accused of a crime or the government wants to throw you out of the country and ruin your life, you will want your trial to resemble Boston Legal, not Kafka’s The Trial. You will want a good attorney and to have one provided for you if you can’t afford one. But I don’t want to make a pure appeal to self-interest here. You should believe in due process because you should care what happens to other people as well. Because the screams of Ahmed Rabbani should haunt us. Because we should empathize with those snatched off the street, who have their lives upended by a government that doesn’t really care whether they’ve done anything wrong, so long as they’re a member of a suspect ethnic group.