Byron Donalds says feds can’t hire enough Judges to give deportees due process

U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, a 2026 candidate for Governor, says some exceptions apply to due process as the Donald Trump administration seeks to remove illegal immigrants from the U.S.

“It is not physically possible to hire that many Judges and process them out of the country. This is why you cannot have open borders to begin with,” Donalds said on “Meet the Press Now.”

Donalds noted that Congress is considering “dollars provided to the administration to speed up the deportation efforts,” but doesn’t believe formal hearings are practical or necessary.

He also says the framers of the Constitution “never envisioned that there would be an executive that would allow millions of people to come into the country illegally,” referring to President Joe Biden.

Furthermore, the nation can’t “hide behind due process,” Donalds said, since “it would take us 15 years to actually process people back out of the United States.”

“When it comes to due process, that is a privilege reserved for American citizens,” Donalds contended, despite the Constitution stating that due process protections apply to “any person,” not just citizens.

“With people who are in our country illegally, there is a semblance of due process, but not nearly at the level of a United States citizen or an American. There are two different standards,” Donalds argued.

The President agrees with this read.

“I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because we have thousands of people that are ready to go out and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Trump said earlier this month, via The New York Times. “We don’t think there’s anything that says that.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and multiple local chapters sued Trump in January over this interpretation.

The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador despite a lower court trying to block the action, has brought the practice into sharp relief, particularly given the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that he should be brought back to the U.S. from the Center for Terrorism and Confinement (CECOT), a prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration is paying to house prisoners there.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, has said the law permits National Guard members to handle deportation hearings, and has offered Florida forces to do so.

“These are not Article 3 Judges. They are executive branch employees, basically. We can absolutely deputize Judge Advocates from our National Guard units to serve as immigration Judges,” he added.