Beneath the fluorescent lights of a crowded town hall, a collision of ideals erupted Friday night as Republican Congresswoman Victoria Spartz declared before her constituents that those who “break the law” forfeit their right to due process.
“If you come here illegally, you violate the law. Period,” Spartz asserted, her words slicing through the room like a blade to the fabric of the Constitution itself.
The declaration, met with boos and walkouts, echoed far beyond the walls of that Indiana hall, striking at the soul of a nation built on the promise that no government power goes unchecked, no soul is rendered invisible before the law.
Due process is the principle that legal matters must be resolved fairly and in accordance with established rules in both civil and criminal cases. The Fifth Amendment states that no one can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
The event, overflowing with citizens long before its start, became a microcosm of America’s raging debate over justice, accountability, and the moral cost of policy.
Questions ricocheted from funding cuts to immigration, but it was Spartz’s defense of mass deportations — and her dismissal of due process for undocumented migrants — that laid bare a fracture in the bedrock of democracy.
When pressed on whether deportees deserve legal recourse, her reply was unequivocal: “There is no due process if you come here illegal.” The crowd, a tapestry of outrage and applause, splintered.
Some audience members were so offended, they stormed out; while others shouted demands for accountability, their signs outside pleading, “Stop Trump,” as if the very air had turned to protest.
Yet this is no abstract quarrel. The Trump administration said in a court filing that a man who was in the U.S. legally, is in a Salvadoran prison right now because of an ‘administrative error’, but federal courts have no jurisdiction to order his release.
The specter looms large of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man married to a US citizen wrongly deported to a foreign supermax prison noted for human rights abuses, despite a U.S. District Court order prohibiting his removal there. Although the Trump administration concedes it made a mistake when it deported Abrego Garcia, it is opposing a request for him to be brought back to the U.S. The Maryland resident a father with protected legal status received in 2019 from an immigration judge, who looked at the facts in his case.
Attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had been deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring Abrego Garcia back now that he is in Salvadoran custody.
Married to a U.S. citizen, father to American children, Abrego was swept into a midnight airlift to a cell where armed guards shaved heads and sealed fates. ICE called it an “oversight,” a cold bureaucrat’s epitaph for a life upended.
The Constitution states only one command twice. The Fifth Amendment says to the federal government that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment , ratified in 1868, uses the same eleven words, called the Due Process Clause, to describe a legal obligation of all states.
Abrego’s story is not an outlier but a harbinger — a single thread in the grotesque tapestry of a system where human beings vanish into the machinery of power.
“Due process is not a luxury,” declared human rights advocate Lisa McCormick, issuing a clarion call in the gathering storm. “It is the foundation upon which this nation stands. To deny it is to hand the government a scythe to reap lives at whim.”
Quoting Winston Churchill, McCormick reminded the room that democracy, for all its flaws, remains the last bulwark against tyranny.
“When we abandon due process and democracy,” McCormick warned, “we abandon the promise that even the least among us deserves a voice, a defense, a chance.”
Spartz’s rhetoric, however, offers no such refuge.
Spartz is a Ukrainian-born, Republican U.S. representative for Indiana’s 5th congressional district, who immigrated to the United States in 2000.
Spartz was a participant in the Freedom Force, a group Republican House members who claimed ‘they’re fighting against socialism in America,’ but within a year of taking office in Washington DC, she had violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act of 2012, by failing to properly disclose that she bought stock in the real estate investment trust, Simon Property Group.
“Aiming for more equal incomes through state intervention is not necessarily any worse that building a greater fortune by stealing, lying or cheating,” said McCormick.
Her refusal to demand resignations of officials embroiled in scandal, her endorsement of defunding public media as a “choice,” and her steadfast alignment with an administration that conflates legality with morality paint a portrait of a representative unmoored from the Constitution she swore to uphold.
When a constituent demanded, “When will you do your job?” the question hung like a verdict.
In the heartland, a reckoning brews. The clash is not merely over immigration or funding but over the soul of a nation.
Due process — that sacred covenant enshrined by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments — is not a loophole for the guilty but a shield for the innocent. To strip it from any person, regardless of status, is to erode the rights of all. For if the government may discard the law for one, it may discard it for anyone.
On July 1, 2024, when Spartz accidentally carried an empty handgun in her suitcase while going through security at Dulles airport, she was issued a citation and allowed to proceed on her international flight to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Parliamentary Assembly.
“Without due process, they could have just taken her aside and shot the Indiana Tea Party founder,” explain McCormick. President Donald Trump’s Project 2025 author after Roberts said during an interview that the U.S. is “in the process of a second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
As twilight fell on Westfield, the echoes of Spartz’s words lingered, a discordant hymn to expedience over justice. But in the shadows of El Salvador’s mega-prisons and the tearful pleas of families torn apart, America faces a mirror.
Will we be a nation of laws, or a nation of men? Will we honor the Constitution, or rend it thread by thread? The answer, etched in the courage of those who walked out and those who spoke up, is a whisper yet growing louder: No liberty is safe when due process dies.