Several members of the caravan of migrants who have been traveling north towards the border shared by the United States and Mexico are suing President Trump and various government agencies and officials, claiming that their rights are being violated under the U.S. Constitution.
Fox News reports that as many as 12 Honduran nationals and their children are listed in a lawsuit that Nexus Services, Inc. filed on their behalf in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, October 31. The grievance charges that the Trump administration’s push to deny them asylum infringes on the plaintiffs’ due process, as promised by the Fifth Amendment.
“President Trump continues to abuse the law, including constitutional rights, to deter Central Americans from exercising their lawful right to seek asylum in the United States, and the fact that innocent children are involved matters none to President Trump,” a representative for the plaintiffs said in the document.
The plaintiff underscores the reason for the migrants’ exodus being “a well-documented human rights crisis,” and furthermore charges that their rights under the Administrative Procedures Act and the Declaratory Judgement Act are being threatened.
Among those named in the suit are the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its Acting Director, Thomas Homan, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the agency’s Acting Commissioner, Kevin K. McAleenan, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) along with its Director, L. Francis Cissna, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the President himself.
Migrants traveling to US sue Trump, government; claim violation of constitutional rights https://t.co/L3exxLjZB2
— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 2, 2018
Back in June, PBS published a report challenging President Trump’s vow to send undocumented migrants captured at the border back to their resident nations with “no judges or court cases.” In the piece, a 1993 judgment passed by the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was cited as posing a conundrum in the light of the so-called “zero-tolerance” policy that Trump espoused at the time. The ruling posed that no person “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
President Trump has since ramped up on his rhetoric and promised to direct 5,200 members of the armed services to stand ground, in anticipation that as many as 4,000 migrants may begin to arrive in the coming weeks. According to a report from the Washington Examiner , Trump also insisted that tent cities will be propped up for the duration of any application process that ensues, in an effort to deny them entry into the U.S. mainland.
