Claim: ICE is “eviscerating due process” when it arrests peaceful undocumented immigrants showing up to their court-scheduled hearings.

Fact-check: What ICE is doing is completely legal under a 29-year-old law (that many at the NYT evidently haven’t read).

Last week on his podcast, Ezra Klein interviewed Radley Balko, a Substack writer and author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces. Balko argues Donald Trump is “building his own paramilitary force” and “eviscerating due process,” specifically in ordering ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who are calmly showing up for their court-mandated hearings. Here’s Balko:

We are seeing suspensions of due process for people who are here and undocumented. We’re seeing people being arrested when they show up for their hearings, when they’re abiding by the law, doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

Ezra watches intently, mournfully, obviously concerned — and as I watched, I was concerned, too.

Why are undocumented people being yanked out of court? Ezra asks, and Balko replies:

The government is saying at these asylum hearings: ‘We’re going to dismiss the government’s case against this person.’ So at that point, the person is no longer someone who went through the proper channels to legally request asylum. At that point, they are now just someone who is undocumented and here without authorization. So now ICE is legally permitted to detain them and sweep them up because they’re no longer in the asylum process.

“As I understand it, that is legally dubious, to say the least,” says Balko.

Clips from this interview have been viewed by almost 800k people on YouTube and X; the podcast reached many more; one of the top comments on YouTube compares the U.S. to the Iranian dictatorship pre-revolution.

Curious, and vaguely scared (as listening to a podcast episode threatening the “evisceration” of due process will make you), I read up on U.S. immigration law and spoke with two immigration attorneys (one current, another former). I wanted to figure out what’s actually going on here, legally.

Here’s what I learned: Radley Balko is wrong about what’s happening when undocumented people are arrested in courthouses. I’ll get to why. Ezra Klein took his falsehoods at face value, which may not surprise some but did surprise me. And neither of them understand U.S. immigration law.