THE LIES THAT TEACH US TO LET GO  |  DAY 3 OF 6

Due process protects the innocent by limiting the government. The moment you accept that some people don't deserve it, you've accepted that the government is never wrong.

D. Wayne Rogers   |   The Public Sentinel for Oversight   |   oversightreport.us

Leonardo Garcia Venegas is a United States citizen from Alabama. He has a Real ID, which Alabama only issues to people who are legally present in the country. He was working inside a nearly built house in Alabama, listening to music on headphones, when a masked immigration agent appeared in the bedroom doorway.

It was the third time agents had detained or questioned him.

The first two times, Garcia Venegas showed his Real ID. Both times, agents dismissed it as fake. Both times, they held him while they checked his citizenship. A ProPublica investigation that tracked more than 170 U.S. citizens detained by ICE in the first nine months of 2025 found Garcia Venegas was not alone. A Mescalero Apache tribal member was pulled out of a store and asked for his passport. A California man who had previously been deported by mistake received another deportation order in the mail. The cases share a common thread: enforcement that moved faster than any review process could follow.

Garcia Venegas filed a federal lawsuit. DHS did not respond to ProPublica's questions about his case.

Victor Cruz had a different experience, though not by much. Cruz is a 55-year-old construction worker and grandfather who had lived in Oregon for 26 years. He had a work permit. He had deferred action status, meaning the Department of Homeland Security had formally reviewed his case and decided not to pursue removal while his application was pending. ICE detained him anyway on his way home from work, held him in a Tacoma facility for three weeks in a concrete cell with inadequate food, and stripped his work permit.

When PBS NewsHour asked DHS about Cruz's case, a spokesperson said, "No one was arrested by mistake." Cruz told a reporter: "I told my wife and kids that if anything happens to me again, I just don't want to live the same nightmare again. I will just sign my deportation right away, because I don't want to go through this again."

Read that sentence again.

A man who was legally entitled to stay in this country said he would voluntarily deport himself rather than endure the process of proving it again. That is not the justice system working. That is the justice system being used as a threat.

Here is the constitutional principle at stake, stated plainly.

The Fifth Amendment says no person, not no citizen, no person, shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment says the same to state governments. The framers chose that word deliberately. They had watched a government decide, arbitrarily and often brutally, who deserved a hearing and who deserved to simply disappear. They found it intolerable. They made it unconstitutional.

Due process does not protect the guilty. Due process protects the innocent from a government that might be wrong. The government is wrong with documented, measurable frequency. The GAO found that between fiscal year 2015 and 2020, ICE arrested 674, detained 121, and removed 70 people who were identified as potential U.S. citizens. The GAO also found that ICE's own training materials are inconsistent with its own citizenship investigation policies, meaning low-level officers are making life-altering decisions without mandatory supervisory oversight.

ProPublica's accounting, covering just the first nine months of 2025, found more than 170 U.S. citizens detained or arrested by DHS agencies. The Cato Institute's director of immigration studies analyzed sweeps in Los Angeles and found racial profiling driving the pattern: officers targeting communities or workplaces correlated by demographics with undocumented populations, regardless of individual legal status.

In Minnesota in early 2026, a federal judge extended an emergency order requiring ICE to give immigration detainees access to attorneys and a minimum delay before transfer. The extension was necessary because, without the order, that access was being obstructed. Detainees were being moved before they could see a lawyer. Courts were being bypassed not accidentally but as a matter of operational practice.

The false permission operating here is the idea that demanding hearings for people you are certain are guilty is somehow an insult to justice. But the government's certainty is not evidence. Its certainty is what the hearing is supposed to test.

Strip the hearing and you strip the only mechanism for discovering that the man in the concrete cell in Tacoma had a work permit. That the construction worker in Alabama had a Real ID. That the North Carolina man with bipolar disorder was a citizen who had never set foot in Mexico.

Once you accept that some people do not deserve hearings, you have accepted that the government is never wrong. And no government in the history of the world has ever managed to never be wrong.

Tomorrow: Free speech has a consistency problem in America right now. The same voices loudest about censorship when their side faces platform restrictions were quiet when the administration issued executive orders stripping law firms of their security clearances, barring their attorneys from federal buildings, and threatening their clients, because those firms had represented clients the president disliked. Four federal judges found all of it unconstitutional. The Constitution was not confused about which side it was on.