Latest news with #AlexanderHamilton
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr. Open ‘Hamilton' Medley With Original Cast at Tony Awards
There are a million things Alexander Hamilton hasn't done, but reuniting the original cast of the Broadway blockbuster Hamilton isn't one. Lin-Manuel Miranda, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, Daveed Diggs, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Christopher Jackson, Jonathan Groff, Ariana DeBose, and others took the stage at the 2025 Tony Awards in celebration of the musical's 10th anniversary. With the cast dressed in elegant black suits and gowns, the original Hamilton cast earned a standing ovation for their stellar performance of a medley of songs from the musical. It opened with Miranda and Odom Jr., who sang 'Non-Stop.' The rest of the cast joined in for their parts throughout the rapid-fire medley, which included 'My Shot,' 'The Schuyler Sisters,' 'Guns and Ships,' 'You'll Be Back,' and 'Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down.)' It also segued through 'The Room Where It Happens' and 'Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story' before the finale of 'Alexander Hamilton.' More from Rolling Stone The Most Exclusive Tony Awards Party of the Night Was Hidden Inside a Scotch Speakeasy Lil Wayne Fleetingly Reminds Us Why He's One of the Best Cynthia Erivo Belts 'Sometimes All You Need Is a Song' to Open Tony Awards It was a crowded stage, with more than 25 actors bringing their characters back to life. Later this year, Odom will reprise his roll as Aaron Burr for much longer than a few minutes. For 12 weeks this fall, he will return to the cast in what he has called 'a deeply meaningful homecoming.' 'I'm so grateful for the chance to step back into the room — especially during this anniversary moment and to revisit this brilliant piece that forever changed my life and the lives of so many,' Odom shared earlier this year. Hamilton opened on Broadway on Aug. 6, 2015. The musical has earned 11 Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, a Grammy Award, and an Olivier. The original cast recording became the first Broadway album to be certified diamond by the RIAA. In 2016, the Hamilton cast performed 'History Has Its Eyes on You,' 'Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),' and 'The Schuyler Sisters' at the Tony Awards. The reunion follows the recent cancellation of a Hamilton run scheduled at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026. 'The Kennedy Center was not created in this spirit, and we're not going to be a part of it while it is the Trump Kennedy Center. We're just not going to be part of it,' Miranda said earlier this year. 'We are not acting against his administration, but against the partisan policies of the Kennedy Center as a result of his recent takeover,' Hamilton producer Jeffery Seller wrote in a statement at the time. 'Political disagreement and debate are vital expressions of democracy. These basic concepts of freedom are at the very heart of Hamilton. However, some institutions are sacred and should be protected from politics.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Best 'Saturday Night Live' Characters of All Time Denzel Washington's Movies Ranked, From Worst to Best 70 Greatest Comedies of the 21st Century
USA Today
a day ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
The cast of Hamilton reunited at the 2025 Tony Awards for a nostalgic performance
The cast of Hamilton reunited at the 2025 Tony Awards for a nostalgic performance The original cast of the iconic Broadway hit Hamilton reunited on stage at the 2025 Tony Awards on Sunday night to perform a medley of songs to celebrate the show's 10-year anniversary. Lin-Manuel Miranda reprised his role as Alexander Hamilton, joined on stage by Leslie Odom Jr. (Aaron Burr), Phillipa Soo (Eliza Hamilton), Renée Elise Goldsberry (Angelica Schuyler), Daveed Diggs (Marquis de Lafayette), Jonathan Groff (King George III), Jasmine Cephas Jones (Peggy Schuyler), Christopher Jackson (George Washington) and Okieriete Onaodowan (Hercules Mulligan). Tony Award-winner Ariana DeBose also joined as part of the talented ensemble from the original show. During the four-plus minute performance, the cast rattled off some of the show's biggest hits, including "My Shot," "The Schuyler Sisters," "History Has Its Eyes On You," "You'll Be Back" and more. The medley rightfully earned a raucous applause and standing ovation from the crowd, with everyone from Oprah Winfrey to George Clooney getting to their feet to cheer. Hamilton debuted on Broadway back on January 20, 2015, taking over pop culture and becoming a part of theater history as it told the story of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton with a new flare. The show was nominated for a record 16 Tony Awards in 2016, winning 11. It earned over a billion dollars in just its first five years from ticket sales, touring, albums, merchandise and the Disney+ movie version.
Time Magazine
2 days ago
- Business
- Time Magazine
BNY CEO Robin Vince on Embracing AI and Navigating Uncertainty
BNY has a storied history. Co-founded by Alexander Hamilton in 1784 to help New York City recover after the Revolutionary War, it is often referred to as America's oldest bank. But today, Robin Vince, who became CEO in 2022, insists, 'A bank isn't what we are, a bank is something that we have. A bank is something that we use to provide services to our clients.' Vince joined BNY, which prefers to call itself a financial services company these days, in 2020 and led its global market infrastructure unit before taking the helm. Before that, he spent 26 years at Goldman Sachs, where he held leadership roles including chief risk officer, treasurer, head of operations, and CEO of Goldman Sachs International Bank. When BNY Mellon—as it was then known, before rebranding last year—tapped Vince to join, he had been considering working in the tech industry after taking a gap year to spend time with his family. But joining another Global Systemically Important Bank (G-SIB) made sense to him for a number of reasons, he says. 'I'd had a lot of engagement with regulators. I'd had some engagement with investors, with shareholders, but I was able to get back to one of the things that I loved, which was clients,' he told TIME during a visit to London. 'And I just liked markets.' In February, BNY signed a multi-year deal with OpenAI that gives it access to the AI company's most advanced reasoning models and tools such as Deep Research, to enhance BNY's internal AI platform, Eliza. The deal also allows OpenAI to see how well its models perform at complex tasks in the real world. TIME spoke with Vince on March 19 about how he is embracing AI, breaking down silos at BNY, and navigating uncertainty. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. BNY is the oldest bank in America, and in the last couple of years, under your leadership, the stock performance has improved markedly. Did your experiences at Goldman Sachs influence how you're leading BNY? I think we're all the product of our upbringings and experiences. As a kid, I had the opportunity to live in the U.K., but also spent a lot of time living in Paris. Then I had the opportunity to move to New York, and so that gave me a little bit of a global sensibility. With the name, 'Bank of New York'—America's oldest bank—it's very easy [to forget], but 40% of our business is outside of the U.S. It's very easy, if you're not careful, to become very centric around a region. And so that upbringing was very helpful to me. The training at Goldman Sachs, which is a terrific organization, and brought a great set of skills to me—I'm the beneficiary of all of that and everything that went before it, but I'm also the beneficiary at BNY of all of the work that my predecessors have done to assemble the set of businesses that we have today. Now, what was the thing that changed? We took a very deliberate look as a leadership team early on in my tenure and said, 'What have we got? Why have we underperformed our potential, and what changes might we need to make to what we do, how we do it, who does it, all of those things, in order to really unlock the potential that we think is in the company.' And the good news, and our good fortune as a team, is that based on everything that had been done over time, we had an amazing set of businesses, and I want to stress that, because it's not preordained that it should be that way, when you come in as a CEO. Sometimes CEOs can come into broken organizations that just don't have the right businesses and that have these huge pivots to make in the very essence of what they do. The good news for us is we had great businesses and we had a great client franchise. Clients have a lot of respect for BNY. They trust us. They do important things with us, but they were a little frustrated with us that we kind of weren't living up to our own potential. That was a client frustration, it was an employee frustration, and it was an investor frustration as well, which is: you all can do more with what you've got. That's what we've been doing for two and a half years, unlocking and realizing that opportunity. And the good news is it has been working. And our investors have noticed. The stock price has about doubled over that period of time. The clients have noticed it and really appreciated it as well, because they're very happy to do more things with us. We have all these businesses, and so when a client did one thing with us, it was frustrating in some ways, on both sides, because they were like, 'You know what? I know you've got more things that you can do to help us, and I'm not really sure how to access it.' And we were like, 'Oh, it's a bit frustrating, and we don't really know how to unlock it.' And so what we've done is we've re-engineered how we operate to be able to do that. And then, of course, our employees. When you're an employee of a firm, you want your firm to be thriving and doing well. So we made everybody a shareholder. So now, not only are employees theoretically excited about the journey. They're economically excited about the journey as well. We've re-imagined how we work and our platforms operating model as part of that strategy. We've re-imagined some of the members of the team, and we've hired new people. We've really tried to think about the culture, and how do we really accelerate the bits of the culture that we love and maybe leave behind some of the bits that we don't. [And] how we think about technology and AI, which we're very excited about. Are there any examples you can give of the bits of the culture that you liked and didn't like, and the things that you've changed? Our people were very client-centric. That is a fantastic thing to have in the culture. And they also were very proud of the company, but they were not used to working as one company, as one team. We had conditioned people to operate in their silos, and we had a lot of different businesses, so we had a lot of different silos. We just decided that we didn't want to be that way. Sometimes you can end up in a situation where the team wants to be fragmented, they like their independence. For the most part, that wasn't the case. So we were able to make the case, and people wanted to throw in for the whole journey. Clients sometimes like it that they can shop your store independently. But yet our clients didn't really like that. So the whole thesis of the fact that we want to be able to come together for clients, we want to be organized more efficiently—we had a lot of duplication of things—we used culture and coming together as a group to be able to deal with those issues. We have three strategic pillars: being more for our clients, running our company better, and power our culture. But it's the 'culture' one that has created the will to go quicker on the others. Can you tell me about the thinking behind your rebrand to BNY? Yeah, so, fun story. This was right when I was right at the beginning during the transition, and I was visiting one of our locations, and I sat with a group of new analysts, and this was not in the United States. And they were like, 'By the way, why is the company called BNY Mellon?' And I explained the history, and they say, 'Yeah, because I'm telling you, people just don't understand that on a U.K. campus, the name doesn't mean that much and I didn't even know you were a bank,' And it was the Mellon thing. So we started to think about the brand, the logo—we'd had it for 17 years. It was a compromise, at the time of the merger between the Bank of New York and Mellon, that that would be the name—and a name 17 years without a change in logo or brand is quite a long time in this day and age. And so we thought it will probably be smart to rethink that and to think about whether there was a way of smartening it up, making it a little bit more modern, but we very deliberately did not do that at the beginning, because I don't like the whole concept of form over substance. At the end of the day, what really matters is the substance. And if you make substantial progress, and you're actually changing as a company, and you're a different company, then when you rebrand, it just makes sense to people, and that's exactly what we did. It was a year and a half later, and we felt a few months before the time was right. We'd done the work. We tried to do it in a very simple way. And we said, look, we're a modern company. We're evolving to a platforms company. We're not the same thing as we were. Maybe we need to rethink the visuals, but also the brand. And then when we launched it, it was just super well received by people, because then people looked at it and said, 'Oh, yes, you aren't that company really anymore. You have evolved.' There was quite a lot of optimism in your industry about President Trump's second term, and now we're seeing the effects of some of his early policies on the U.S. economy, and talk of a possible recession. How are you thinking about that? Was that optimism unfounded? Look, there's a lot going on in the world. The world itself is complicated, right? It's not just the United States. We've seen this in France, in Germany, here in the U.K., there are a lot of countries that are grappling with a desire to have a bit of a shift in direction based on the circumstances that they find themselves in. And President Trump was very clear about that during the campaign. He had a different vision for how America needed to change in order to be able to be the best version of itself. And he laid that out pretty clearly, pretty starkly, and that's exactly what he's doing. I always reflect back to during the first Trump Administration, particularly outside the U.S., including here in continental Europe, including the U.K., people would sometimes use this phrase of 'the signal and the noise,' and they'd get confused exactly about what was going on. And I think the same thing's happening to some extent now, which is, in any process, there's tactics, and then there's strategy. And President Trump's been fairly clear about the strategic things that he's very focused on, but yet it's very easy to get distracted by the tactics. And so when there's a conversation about something that just attracts popular attention it's easy to forget what the plan is under the hood. He has a long range view of things that should change in the United States, and it was always going to require some change, some dislocation, some discomfort, maybe volatility in markets to be able to get there. You cannot do these things without creating some of those byproducts. And so now we're just living [that] reality. They're moving quickly, they've got an ambitious agenda, they want to create a lot of change. And so the market struggles to digest all of those things, especially when it's all happening at the same time. As the leader of a systemically important institution, how are you navigating the short-term uncertainty? The first thing about uncertainty is, obviously, we don't wish uncertainty onto the world, but when things are happening in markets, when things are happening in the world, we're able to be helpful to our clients. We're able to, in some cases, explain. I was in D.C. last week and spent time with various members of the Administration. I had the opportunity to hear directly from the President on some of these topics as well. Now, when you're in the client coverage business and you're in the business of providing solutions and stability and resiliency and efficiency to clients, it's not a bad thing to have clients want to come talk to you and understand how you can help them and so these types of environments actually can be catalysts for business activity. Having said all of that, you never want too much uncertainty in the world or in markets, but the market was on the high side. It was only three months ago that people were looking at the market and [asking] were the tech companies overvalued? Had the stock market overextended? There was a whole debate around that. Now we've had a correction on those things. I don't think it's reasonable to think about that as the beginnings of a recession. I think it's reasonable to think about that as a correction in markets, because that's kind of what's happened. And it was exactly the sort of correction that people, three months ago, were talking about was probably going to have to happen at some point in 2025. So I think that context is quite important. And if you look at the bond market the long end of the curve has come down in terms of rates, and that's probably a good thing for the U.S. consumer, because mortgage rates are a little cheaper and the cost of borrowing for corporates is a little cheaper. The price of oil has come down a little bit, that's probably kind of a good thing. So there are puts and takes to this whole thing, and what really matters is, how's it going to play out over a slightly longer period of time? There's no question that consumer confidence and CEO confidence in the U.S. has taken a little bit of a dip, because people don't like uncertainty. Uncertainty creates an uncertain environment, and therefore you're less confident. But the facts of the economy have so far been pretty good, and they've been holding in there. So we'll have to see how that evolves, and clearly, there are risks that things could go in different directions. But so far, there's no indication that we're on the precipice of something dire. Another influence that President Trump has had, since before he even came into office, was around DEI. That's something that we've seen being rolled back across corporate America. It was reported that BNY has been rolling back certain diversity efforts. How are you thinking about DEI and ensuring diversity of thought within the business? Well, I think you're right. The diversity of thought in a team, diversity of different perspectives, is very important in any group of people. In a business community, you don't want everybody to be an absolute clone of each other. Then you get groupthink, and that's not super helpful. So, we prize being able to have teams who could look at problems from different angles, different perspectives. We're a global firm. We need different global perspectives as well. We have five principles that guide our behavior: we want to be client obsessed, we want to stay curious in terms of how we approach things, we want to spark progress, we want to own it— we want to have an approach, not only to our sense of ownership of the company and the trust that comes with that, but we want to be have an ownership mentality in how we approach our job. And then the fifth one, very important, is we want to thrive together, and we talk about thriving together exactly for the reason that I mentioned earlier on—we were siloed. In the past, we had different corners of the firm. They didn't know each other, people couldn't bridge regions [or] businesses. How can you provide a singular delivery of BNY to a client when you come at it from all these different nooks and crannies? So thriving together means a lot of things to us, but including being one team, solving problems, creating solutions for clients, and doing it together, that is part of what I would now describe as the spirit of the company, and thriving together is a big deal for us. And so, has there been a change in how you're thinking specifically about DEI? So we have changed from a siloed, separate mentality to one of coming together as a team. That's the thing that's really changed. And so it's this sense of creating a sense of belonging in the company, where everybody can be here and belong, feel valued, feel that they can contribute to the team, but we've centered ourselves around: if we do all those things well, we will thrive together, and that's what will drive the company forward. Can you tell me about your OpenAI deal, and what you're thinking about the potential of AI? We think AI is a very significant development in the world full stop, and in the world of technology, and ultimately, it's our view that companies that don't take AI seriously are at real risk of being left behind. We leverage the general intelligence models, but we are building our own agents. We can train agents on different topics, and we have quite a significant number of agents now in production and in use. We very recently onboarded our first digital employee. And the difference between an agent for us and a digital employee is a digital employee has a login ID, they have an email, they have an avatar, they can appear at a Teams call, and they can actually operate using the same interfaces that a human would use to operate, as opposed to an agent, which can't type on a keyboard, and therefore, there are certain systems that don't necessarily have the right interfaces for the AI agent to plug straight in. When you have a login and an email, the [digital employee] can actually report on its activities, can send emails, can follow up, can receive things. And the other thing about a digital employee is it has a human manager who can supervise its activity and direct work to it in the way that you could with a human employee. Now, the interesting thing about the digital employee is they can do things that, frankly, human employees don't love to do, which could be quite mundane and repetitive tasks, but ones that involve research in order to be able to investigate things. And they've got very good audit trails, because you can see everything that they're doing, but you can also see the brain patterns associated with how they thought about the things that they were doing. And so yes, we're excited about AI. We run a multi-agentic framework, and we have multi-agent solutions that are actually now in production. And we think this will be a thing that will be very valuable for us, but also for our clients, because we can solve problems for clients using these situations. And so we're proud to partner with OpenAI. We joined a program, there are others that are in the program and their Frontier program as well. Is that going to involve potentially eliminating roles? I think the way to think about AI, at least for us, is we want AI to be able to be for everyone in the company, because we view it as a real powerful leverage tool for everyone. To give you an example, about 60% of our employees have actually onboarded themselves onto our AI platform and that's a prerequisite to be able to build agents. We have about 5,000 people who have actually experimented with an agent and building an agent themselves, and only half of those are from our engineering team. So we view this as a way of being able to create intelligence leverage for people, and we think that our employees will be excited about being able to do that, because we've got lots of demand for our services. We have finite capacity to do all the things that we want to do, and so if we can create more capacity using AI, we free our people up to go do more things for clients, solve more problems and grow ourselves faster. So, that is actually our biggest focus for AI. We love efficiency, but it's efficiency so that we can go do more things.
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - Trump wants to destroy fundamental rights that have existed for 800 years
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War, it is appropriate to recall the core principles that fueled Americans' fight against tyranny. Central to this struggle was the liberation from arbitrary governmental violations of civil liberties, particularly the right to due process before imprisonment. As Alexander Hamilton warned in The Federalist No. 84, 'The practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' This ancient right, developed through centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence, is not a mere convenience. It is a bedrock of our legal system. The foundations of due process and habeas corpus trace back to Magna Carta, the 'Great Charter' that the English barons imposed on King John at Runnymede in 1215. Chapter 39 of Magna Carta proclaimed, 'No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we [King John] proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.' The framers of the Constitution were deeply influenced by their Anglo-Saxon legal heritage. The colonists of the 1770s felt they were being denied their rights as Englishmen. The Declaration of Independence accused King George III of establishing 'an absolute tyranny over these states,' improperly influencing the judiciary, depriving colonists 'of the benefits of trial by jury' and 'transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences.' That is why these protections were enshrined in the Constitution. Article I explicitly protects habeas corpus, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee due process. The Fifth Amendment declares: 'No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.' Trump's recent immigration actions represent a stark departure from these foundational principles. The U.S. government paid El Salvador to imprison more than 200 immigrants from Venezuela and El Salvador in a notorious maximum-security prison. The basis for their imprisonment was that they were suspected of being members of criminal gangs, though the government did not provide compelling evidence of this, and the men did not have the opportunity to prove that they were not gang members. The Fifth Amendment's 'no person' clause does not limit its guarantees to citizens; it explicitly prohibits deprivation of liberty without due process. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the district court that the government had to facilitate and effectuate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. to provide him with the opportunity to question the government's assertion that he was a gang member. Reagan-appointed Judge Harvie J. Wilkinson, writing for the majority, denied the government's motion for an emergency stay in the Garcia case, stating, 'The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.' Wilkinson rejected the notion that transferring custody absolved the government of its constitutional obligations. The Supreme Court's subsequent order that the government facilitate the return of Garcia was met with defiance from the White House, which tweeted, 'He's NOT coming back.' Furthermore, Trump's statements during an Oval Office press conference, where he threatened to send 'homegrown criminals' to the same foreign prison, reveal a chilling intent to expand this practice. 'Homegrown criminals are next … You gotta build about five more places,' he told President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. When asked in a television interview if he had to uphold the Constitution, Trump said, 'I don't know.' His top White House aide, Stephen Miller, later said that the administration was 'actively looking at' suspending habeas corpus. This stance contradicts the essence of American jurisprudence. As Justice Antonin Scalia argued in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 'the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive.' Trump says that giving each accused person a 'trial' would take too long. But due process does not necessarily mean a full trial; it could be a hearing before an immigration or administrative judge. The core principle is the right of people accused of breaking the law to have the opportunity to defend themselves. As a popular social media post states, 'You can't say criminals don't deserve due process — due process is the thing that decides if they are criminals. Otherwise you're just kidnapping people you don't like.' Defending due process is not about shielding criminals, it is about safeguarding every individual from the arbitrary power that America's founders fought to abolish. Trump's actions and statements signal a profound threat to the very liberties that define our nation. James P. Pfiffner is professor emeritus in the Schar School at George Mason University. He has written or edited 15 books on the presidency and American government. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
23-05-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Trump wants to destroy fundamental rights that have existed for 800 years
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War, it is appropriate to recall the core principles that fueled Americans' fight against tyranny. Central to this struggle was the liberation from arbitrary governmental violations of civil liberties, particularly the right to due process before imprisonment. As Alexander Hamilton warned in The Federalist No. 84, 'The practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' This ancient right, developed through centuries of Anglo-American jurisprudence, is not a mere convenience. It is a bedrock of our legal system. The foundations of due process and habeas corpus trace back to Magna Carta, the 'Great Charter' that the English barons imposed on King John at Runnymede in 1215. Chapter 39 of Magna Carta proclaimed, 'No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we [King John] proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.' The framers of the Constitution were deeply influenced by their Anglo-Saxon legal heritage. The colonists of the 1770s felt they were being denied their rights as Englishmen. The Declaration of Independence accused King George III of establishing 'an absolute tyranny over these states,' improperly influencing the judiciary, depriving colonists 'of the benefits of trial by jury' and 'transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offences.' That is why these protections were enshrined in the Constitution. Article I explicitly protects habeas corpus, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee due process. The Fifth Amendment declares: 'No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.' Trump's recent immigration actions represent a stark departure from these foundational principles. The U.S. government paid El Salvador to imprison more than 200 immigrants from Venezuela and El Salvador in a notorious maximum-security prison. The basis for their imprisonment was that they were suspected of being members of criminal gangs, though the government did not provide compelling evidence of this, and the men did not have the opportunity to prove that they were not gang members. The Fifth Amendment's 'no person' clause does not limit its guarantees to citizens; it explicitly prohibits deprivation of liberty without due process. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the district court that the government had to facilitate and effectuate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. to provide him with the opportunity to question the government's assertion that he was a gang member. Reagan-appointed Judge Harvie J. Wilkinson, writing for the majority, denied the government's motion for an emergency stay in the Garcia case, stating, 'The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.' Wilkinson rejected the notion that transferring custody absolved the government of its constitutional obligations. The Supreme Court's subsequent order that the government facilitate the return of Garcia was met with defiance from the White House, which tweeted, 'He's NOT coming back.' Furthermore, Trump's statements during an Oval Office press conference, where he threatened to send 'homegrown criminals' to the same foreign prison, reveal a chilling intent to expand this practice. 'Homegrown criminals are next … You gotta build about five more places,' he told President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. When asked in a television interview if he had to uphold the Constitution, Trump said, 'I don't know.' His top White House aide, Stephen Miller, later said that the administration was 'actively looking at' suspending habeas corpus. This stance contradicts the essence of American jurisprudence. As Justice Antonin Scalia argued in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 'the very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the executive.' Trump says that giving each accused person a 'trial' would take too long. But due process does not necessarily mean a full trial; it could be a hearing before an immigration or administrative judge. The core principle is the right of people accused of breaking the law to have the opportunity to defend themselves. As a popular social media post states, 'You can't say criminals don't deserve due process — due process is the thing that decides if they are criminals. Otherwise you're just kidnapping people you don't like.' Defending due process is not about shielding criminals, it is about safeguarding every individual from the arbitrary power that America's founders fought to abolish. Trump's actions and statements signal a profound threat to the very liberties that define our nation. James P. Pfiffner is professor emeritus in the Schar School at George Mason University. He has written or edited 15 books on the presidency and American government.
