Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) made it clear on Monday that he was not going to simply step into the trap laid for him by NBC News host Kristen Welker when she asked about a conversation she&#8217;d had with President Donald Trump on Sunday&#8217;s broadcast of &#8220;Meet the Press.&#8221;
Welker took an exchange from Sunday&#8217;s show regarding whether or not illegal immigrants were entitled to due process simply because they were physically in the United States — a question Trump had said he was not sure about — and asked Donalds how he would respond to the same question. Donalds, instead of answering the question directly, gave a response that exposed the framing of the question as an attempt to force him into suggesting that Trump&#8217;s answer had been out of line.
WATCH:
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
🚨NEW: Byron Donalds TURNS TABLES on Kristen Welker after she presses him on &#8220;due process&#8221; for illegal immigrants🚨
DONALDS: &#8220;When the framers wrote our Constitution, they never envisioned that there would be an executive that would allow millions of people to come into the… <a href="https://t.co/OIUn4VqKto">pic.twitter.com/OIUn4VqKto</a>
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) <a href="https://twitter.com/JasonJournoDC/status/1919508253928783900?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">May 5, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Welker read the text of the Fifth Amendment and then pressed Donalds for a response: &#8220;The Constitution says any person, not citizen and therein lies the debate and the root of my question. I mean, does &#8216;any person&#8217; just apply to citizens in your mind or does it apply to citizens and non-citizens? Secretary of State Marco Rubio says it applies to citizens and non-citizens.&#8221;
&#8220;Let&#8217;s be very clear,&#8221; Donalds began, taking a jab at former President Joe Biden and his administration&#8217;s open borders policies. &#8220;First and foremost, when the framers wrote our Constitution, they never envisioned that there would be an executive that would allow millions of people to come into the country illegally.&#8221;
&#8220;Number two, more importantly, you have a situation right now — is it okay for any administration to not follow the law, abuse border security laws, let millions of people in, and then hide behind a court system to say, &#8216;Well, now they’re here, so now we have to go through a lengthy process&#8217;?&#8221; he asked.

House GOP Sept 18

NBC Host Lays Trap For Byron Donalds. He’s Not Taking The Bait.

NBC Host Lays Trap For Byron Donalds. He's Not Taking The Bait.

Byron Donalds

Constitution

Donald Trump

Due Process

Illegal Immigration

Media

Politics

President Trump’s signal policy — and the one that is working the best for him — is immigration.
Polling shows that President Trump&#8217;s immigration policy is highly popular. It&#8217;s not just because Americans are sick and tired of the open borders policy of the Biden administration. It&#8217;s also because Democrats continue to take the worst possible tack when it comes to this sort of stuff.
The tack they should be taking on immigration right now is that President Trump is right to close the border, that he is correct to unleash ICE, to go find criminal illegal immigrants and deport them — but we need to obey the law.
That would be the intelligent approach to this particular issue. But Democrats have decided that the smart approach is to shove their heads directly up their own a**es. What that means is that they are instead going out of their way to praise MS-13 members and suggest that President Trump is wrong to try and deport all of those people.
This led to the awkward situation of absolute dolt Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland — who has the IQ of a turnip — going down to El Salvador to meet with a man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is a suspected MS-13 member and whose wife accused him of allegedly beating her.
Garcia was deported to El Salvador, but the Trump DOJ said it was a processing issue mistake. Thus, Democrats should have said, “Listen, everyone deserves due process. If you are here on a green card, you deserve whatever the due process is for a green card holder. If you are here as an illegal immigrant, you deserve whatever due process is available to you under the law. Due process shouldn&#8217;t be violated; it&#8217;s sacrosanct in the United States.”
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2183-pope-francis-dead-what-comes-next-member-exclusive?elementPosition=2&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
That&#8217;s the argument they should have made. Instead, because they have an internal emotional necessity to valorize people who are “victims” of the Trump administration, they&#8217;ve decided to treat people who are actually quite bad with Sympathy. This led to the awkward spectacle of Chris Van Hollen being asked if the person he visited down in El Salvador and had drinks with was a member of MS-13.
And he couldn’t answer the question.
“What Donald Trump is trying to do here is change the subject,” Van Hollen <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/tv/van-hollen-deflects-twice-after-cnns-dana-bash-asks-point-blank-if-abrego-garcia-is-a-member-of-ms-13/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told CNN’s Dana Bash</a>. “The subject at hand is that he and his administration are defying a court order to give Abrego Garcia his due process rights. They are trying to litigate on social media what they should be doing in the courts. They need to put up or shut up in the courts.”
“But since you were the one person to have met with him and since this is a thing, you say, on social media, it&#8217;s what we hear from Donald Trump and Republicans every day all day long, you didn&#8217;t ask him?” Bash asked.
“I didn&#8217;t ask him that because I know what his answer is,” Van Hollen answered. “What he told me was he was sad and traumatized that he was being imprisoned because he has committed no crimes.”
“Sad and traumatized,” says the likely MS-13 member. You can see Van Hollen trying to backtrack and turn it into a due process argument, which is a better argument for Democrats. 
The Supreme Court, over the course of the last 72 hours, handed out <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/19/politics/supreme-court-alien-enemies-act-order/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">an order</a> for the Trump administration to respond to an emergency appeal and stated, “The government is directed not to remove any members of the putative class detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.”
Those would be the people being detained under the so-called Alien Enemies Act, which is an 18th-century law designed to allow the expeditious removal of people who are declared wartime enemies by the executive branch of the government.
There was <a href="https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a1007_22p3.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">a dissent</a> by Justices Alito and Justice Thomas, saying:
<blockquote>Shortly after midnight yesterday, the Court hastily and prematurely granted unprecedented emergency relief. &#8230; Although the order does not define the “putative class,” it appears the Court means all members of the class that the habeas petitioners sought to have certified, namely “all non-citizens in custody in the Northern District of Texas who were, are, or would be subject to the March 2025 Presidential Proclamation entitled “Invocation of the Alien Enemies Act Regarding the Invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua and/or its implementation.</blockquote>
Alito and Thomas criticized the Court for doing all this by saying that even though it&#8217;s not clear the court had jurisdiction, it&#8217;s questionable whether the applicants complied with their obligation to seek emergency injunctive relief in the district court, and that the Court of Appeals is already considering the issue of emergency relief.
They wrote:
<blockquote>The papers before us, while alleging that the applicants were in imminent danger of removal, provided little concrete support for that allegation. …In sum, literally in the middle of the night, the Court issued unprecedented and legally questionable relief without giving the lower courts a chance to rule, without hearing from the opposing party, within eight hours of receiving the application, with dubious factual support for its order, and without providing any explanation for its order. I refused to join the Court’s order because we had no good reason to think that, under the circumstances, issuing an order at midnight was necessary or appropriate. </blockquote>
I think what the rest of the Court would say is, “We wouldn&#8217;t think that was necessary or appropriate either, except for the fact that we&#8217;ve now had situations in which the Trump administration has allegedly ignored the orders of lower courts not to do a deportation and, instead, went ahead with the deportation.”
That&#8217;s the argument being made on the other side of the aisle.
One of the things that should become clear to Republicans at this point is that doing things in meticulous fashion is likely to lead to longer-lasting victories than doing them as one-offs and in quick fashion. That’s because, when it comes to morality, the Trump administration is not only correct, they are unbelievably correct.
Tom Homan, our bulldog border czar, slammed Van Hollen for his sympathy for MS-13 members, <a href="https://grabien.com/story?id=523850" target="_blank" rel="noopener">saying</a>, “What shocks me is that he’s remained silent on the travesty that happened on our southern border. Many people die. Thousands of people die. I met with hundreds of angel moms and dads who buried their children that were murdered by an illegal alien. How many angel moms and dads has he met in the state of Maryland? That&#8217;s what concerns me.”
When it comes to the politics of immigration, Republicans are absolutely right.
But, in addition, if they practice the law correctly, they’ll have longer-lasting victories, because otherwise many of the things they are trying to do might get reversed on appeal, and that would be bad for the Trump administration.
I&#8217;m rooting for the Trump administration to do everything correctly so its policies work to their utmost.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen Meets With Wrongly Imprisoned Man Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia in El Salvador

Deportation, Due Process, And Democrat Delusions

Ben Shapiro

Democrats

El Salvador

Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Maryland

Opinion

Supreme Court

U.S. Senate

A top Republican in Congress rejected on Sunday CNN anchor Dana Bash&#8217;s assertion that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an illegal immigrant deported from the United States and sent to prison in his home country of El Salvador, has been robbed of due process.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) shot back after Bash began an <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/20/politics/video/sotu-majority-whip-emmer-defends-trump-handling-of-brego-garcia-deportation-case" target="_blank" rel="noopener">interview</a> on &#8220;State of the Union&#8221; by pressing the lawmaker on the case of Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old living in Maryland who was sent back to El Salvador last month despite a 2019 court order prohibiting him from being sent back to the country.
&#8220;I want to start with what the core issue is here. And that is the fact that the administration detained and deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia without any due process, violated a judge&#8217;s deportation protection order, refused to provide evidence in court to back up its allegations. Does that concern you?&#8221; Bash asked.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
.<a href="https://twitter.com/GOPMajorityWhip?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@GOPMajorityWhip</a>: &#8220;President Trump made it very clear — [he&#8217;s] going to get rid of the gang members, the murderers, the rapists, the terrorists &#8230; and I think they&#8217;re doing a good job of it.&#8221; <a href="https://t.co/n7U5zjan5x">pic.twitter.com/n7U5zjan5x</a>
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) <a href="https://twitter.com/RapidResponse47/status/1913948030983700628?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 20, 2025</a></blockquote>
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&#8220;Actually, if you look at this, it&#8217;s very interesting when people talk about the fact that this illegal alien, who is not a resident of the U.S. — he is a citizen of El Salvador — actually did have due process in an asylum hearing, where his request for asylum was rejected,&#8221; Emmer said, noting how Abrego Garcia was granted protection from being returned to El Salvador in 2019 due to concerns about local gangs endangering him, but not asylum.
&#8220;The Trump administration, as part of the promise that they made during the campaign, President Trump made it very clear, I&#8217;m going to get rid of the gang members, the murderers, the rapists, the terrorists. And this is part of that process in keeping that campaign promise. And I think they&#8217;re doing a good job at it,&#8221; Emmer said.
Emmer was alluding to how the Trump administration <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/facilitate-not-effectuate-wh-responds-to-scotus-ruling-on-mistakenly-deported-salvadoran" target="_blank" rel="noopener">accuses</a> Abrego Garcia of being a member of MS-13, which has been <a href="https://www.state.gov/designation-of-international-cartels/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">designated</a> as a foreign terror organization, and has released <a href="https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1396906/dl?inline" target="_blank" rel="noopener">documents</a> to substantiate the affiliation. Abrego Garcia&#8217;s attorneys <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69777799/1/abrego-garcia-v-noem/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">deny</a> the claim.
&#8220;There&#8217;s no evidence that was provided because there was no hearing in which to do so that he is either a murderer or a criminal or a gang member,&#8221; Bash replied. &#8220;Isn&#8217;t that something that should be provided to a judge, even an immigration judge, before somebody who has been in this country illegally, no question, but has been in this country and has appeared before judges before should be afforded?&#8221;
Emmer responded, &#8220;Actually, I think he was afforded that due process. In this case, an illegal alien was transported back to El Salvador. The administration initially thought it was a mistake, subsequently says it was not a mistake. The courts, interestingly, have suggested that we need to understand what &#8216;facilitate&#8217; means in the order. So they have deferred back to the lower court, Dana, to tell the administration, &#8216;facilitate&#8217; means this. And what&#8217;s going on in El Salvador now is, you have a citizen of El Salvador that is within the country of El Salvador. It really isn&#8217;t the U.S.&#8217; ability to go in and remove someone. It&#8217;ll be up to the president of El Salvador.&#8221;
Bash later read from a federal appeals court <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400/gov.uscourts.ca4.178400.8.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">order</a> refusing to stop a judge’s demand for Trump administration officials to testify on whether they are making an effort to &#8220;facilitate&#8221; getting Garcia back, saying, &#8220;The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order &#8230; This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.&#8221;
Asked for his response, Emmer said, &#8220;Yes, and it&#8217;s been referred to the lower court to interpret what &#8216;facilitate&#8217; means. Dana, you make it — you want to make it about a much bigger thing. This is isolated incidents like the order that was issued after midnight this morning saying that they&#8217;re going to delay some deportations so that the lower court process can continue. These will happen on a case-by-case basis. And, again, the administration is absolutely following the law. I see nothing that they have done that&#8217;s illegal. Certainly, judges may disagree here and there, but the Supreme Court has been pretty good about supporting what this administration is doing legally.&#8221;

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn

Top Republican Takes On CNN Anchor’s Claim That Abrego Garcia Did Not Get Due Process

U.S.

U.S. House of Representatives

As the Department of Education yanks $175 million of federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania for violating Title IX by allowing males into women’s sports, Secretary Linda McMahon should also consider cracking down on other, more common procedural violations of Title IX that have been routinely committed by colleges for over a decade: that is, violations against due process for students and faculty accused of sexual misconduct.
This status quo was created by the Obama Department of Education’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, which gutted protections for the accused in the name of “victims’ rights,” under penalty of losing federal funding. The letter mandated that colleges use the “preponderance of evidence” standard — which only demands that the guilty be deemed over 50% likely to have committed misconduct — as opposed to the stronger “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” standard employed in criminal trials in actual courts. It also allowed alleged victims to appeal the result of a disciplinary hearing — a form of double jeopardy otherwise barred by the legal system. Moreover, it discouraged cross-examination of victims, claiming this would “retraumatize” them, and enabled a single-investigator model, in which the person investigating the sexual misconduct claim would also adjudicate the sexual misconduct claim and decide as to whether or not the accused was guilty — giving the investigator the near absolute power to be “prosecutor, judge, and jury” at once, as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education <a href="https://www.thefire.org/news/breaking-new-title-ix-regulations-undermine-campus-free-speech-and-due-process-rights" target="_blank" rel="noopener">called</a> it.
Having received Obama’s memo, colleges went above and beyond — the Constitution, that is: even after President Trump took office for the first time and then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded the Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letter in 2017, colleges kept their kangaroo courts — and began to be taken to court themselves. In two notable cases, federal courts determined that accused students at the <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/26/us-appeals-court-finds-student-accused-sexual-assault-was-denied-due-process" target="_blank" rel="noopener">University of Cincinnati</a> and the <a href="https://www.thefire.org/news/court-holds-university-michigan-administrators-personally-liable-violating-students-due" target="_blank" rel="noopener">University of Michigan</a> had their constitutional rights to due process violated. Per a 2019 <a href="https://nyujlpp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Harris-Johnson-Campus-Courts-in-Court-22-nyujlpp-49.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> by Samantha Harris and K.C. Johnson, over 500 lawsuits were filed by accused students in the post-2011 period; 340 lawsuits went to federal court; colleges lost over 90 federal decisions; and colleges chose to settle over 70 lawsuits out of court before a decision could be made. This was around the peak of #MeToo and #BelieveAllWomen: in that cultural moment, anyone accused of sexual misconduct was essentially presumed guilty until proven innocent, a horrible inversion of the American rule of law.
Eventually, in 2020, DeVos established a rule ensuring Title IX proceedings would respect due process and treat both accuser and accused fairly. Because DeVos used the rulemaking process, rather than ruling by “Dear Colleague” fiat as her predecessor did, her decision was harder to reverse by the Biden administration. As a result, the Biden rule came toward the end of his administration in 2024, and, thanks to the administration’s overreaching attempt to rewrite Title IX to include “gender identity,” was immediately caught up in federal injunctions and barely implemented by the time Trump took office a second time and officially brought back the DeVos rule. That means that despite the change in administrations and attempted changes to Title IX by Biden, most colleges have been subject to the DeVos rule for most of the past five years.
Nevertheless, <a href="https://x.com/kcjohnson9/status/1893051067799060764" target="_blank" rel="noopener">lawsuits</a> over the past several years have continued to be filed by accused students and faculty alleging that their colleges treated them unfairly in Title IX proceedings. Just this month, the Fourth Circuit <a href="https://www.carolinajournal.com/expelled-unc-student-can-pursue-reinstatement-not-money-in-federal-suit/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ruled</a> in favor of an accused student at the University of North Carolina, noting that due process, live hearings, and cross-examination are crucial in Title IX proceedings. The persistence of lawsuits from the accused suggests that colleges are still not treating the accused fairly, and, as a result, are not only potentially disciplining, expelling, and firing perfectly innocent people — mostly men — they are also undermining the validity of all allegations, which makes it more difficult for real victims — mostly women — to be taken seriously.
College bureaucrats act this way in part because they are concerned with their own interests first: the #MeToo zeitgeist of yesterday still has them convinced that the fallout from blatantly unconstitutional proceedings will be less damaging to them than the possibility of activists calling them “rape apologists” for treating accused students and faculty with fairness. The Department of Education can change this calculus by stripping federal funds from every institution violating the rights of the accused. Only harsh federal action and the potential for penalties where it hurts will show colleges that they will suffer more for presuming guilt and holding unfair proceedings than they will for presuming innocence and treating both parties fairly, as the American rule of law demands.
On a more human note, colleges are often the places where young men and young women form their opinions of the world and of each other. Especially at a time when relations between the sexes are <a href="https://www.economist.com/international/2024/03/13/why-the-growing-gulf-between-young-men-and-women" target="_blank" rel="noopener">souring</a>, it is crucial that colleges be expected to follow the law if they are to continue to be entrusted with taxpayer dollars.
* * *
Neeraja Deshpande is a policy analyst and engagement coordinator at Independent Women.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Views Of Yale University As Ivy League Pay Soars

‘Prosecutor, Judge, And Jury’: Why Campus Kangaroo Courts Should Lose Federal Funding

'Prosecutor, Judge, And Jury': Why Campus Kangaroo Courts Should Lose Federal Funding

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Due Process

NBC Host Lays Trap For Byron Donalds. He’s Not Taking The Bait.

Deportation, Due Process, And Democrat Delusions

Top Republican Takes On CNN Anchor’s Claim That Abrego Garcia Did Not Get Due Process

‘Prosecutor, Judge, And Jury’: Why Campus Kangaroo Courts Should Lose Federal Funding