Appearing with professional narrative engineer Margaret Brennan, Senator Rand Paul discusses his DC perspective on the need to protect criminal aliens from excessive deportation action.
Senator Paul agrees with Mrs Brennan that all persons, including illegal alien entrants into the United States, deserve constitutional protection. As an outcome of that viewpoint the Alien Enemies Act is in a state of contradiction and conflict. WATCH:
[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: And we turn now to Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul. He is the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, and he joins us this morning from Bowling Green, Kentucky. Good morning to you, Senator.
SEN. RAND PAUL: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Sure, because of your role in Homeland Security, I want to follow up where we left off with National Security Adviser Waltz. There are legal questions around using these authorities to send out detainees without giving them a day in court. But there’s also just questions of how it’s being handled in regard to these individuals who were rejected by El Salvador, one for gender, one because they weren’t Venezuelan at all. Do these concern- does any of this concern you? Along with claims from their family members that many of these people weren’t gang members?
SEN. PAUL: There are some big legal questions here. On the one hand, the Bill of Rights applies to everyone, to persons. The Bill of Rights doesn’t specifically designate citizens. It’s really anyone in the United States the Bill of Rights applies to. On the other hand, the Alien and Enemies Act simply says, you really don’t get much process. The president can simply declare that you are somehow a problem for foreign policy and opposed to our foreign policy, and you can be deported. So really, ultimately, this goes to the court, and then the court is going to have to decide, are they going to declare unconstitutional a law that’s been around for a couple hundred years, or are they going to defer to Congress? If you look at the TikTok decision recently, which I don’t agree with, but in the TikTok decision, the court basically said we’re going to defer to Congress. Congress says this is about national security, and who are we to question Congress–




