Just How Much Due Process Did Elian Get?

Clinton DoJ Ignored Court in Bid to Send Elian Gonzalez Back to Cuba

Sometimes, a picture does day a thousand words. On Easter Saturday, April 22, 2000, heavily armed federal agents seized six-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint from a closet in his uncle's Miami home where he had been hiding.

Elian had been in the U.S. for just five months. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, two fisherman providentially found Elian floating in an inner tube, one of only two survivors of a tragedy at sea that claimed the life of his mother and ten others fleeing Communist Cuba.

Almost from day one the Clinton White House did everything in its power—and outside its power—to send Elian back to Cuba. Google AI, an aggregator of mainstream reporting, sums up the case:

“Attorney General Janet Reno and later the Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, disagreed with a court ruling and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) determination regarding the case. They determined that Elian should be returned to his father in Cuba, overriding the court and INS's decisions. Specifically, Holder later claimed he didn't need a court order to make this decision, stating that he believed the court and INS rulings were invalid.” Overriding? Didn’t need a court order? Invalid? Interesting.

Not surprisingly, Holder, who was Reno’s Deputy Attorney General, has a much softer spot in his heart for MS-13 gangbanger Kilmar Abrego Garcia than he did for Elian. Speaking with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, he called Trump’s treatment of Garcia “disgusting, shameful.” This new found champion of due process urged viewers to “stand up and fight now,” adding, “There’s a treadmill that we’re potentially getting on here that could result in the erosion of rights for American citizens.”

Treadmill? I think the metaphorically-challenged Holder meant slippery slope.

On April 19, 2000, the seventh anniversary of the DoJ’s lethal raid on the Mount Carmel community in Waco, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Elian was to remain in the U.S. until his family in Miami could appeal for an asylum hearing in May.

While the Elian case wound its way through the courts, Holder and Reno had little patience for due process. Although Elian’s Miami relatives wanted the boy to stay in Miami to enjoy the freedom his mother sacrificed her life to give him, Elian’s father, under pressure from the Castro regime, wanted the boy back. The fact that he and his wife had been separated for three years and the mom had custody did not enter Holder’s calculus.

More critically, Archer Daniels Midland, a major President Clinton donor, wanted to keep Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro happy. Clinton wanted to keep ADM happy. Reno wanted to keep Clinton happy. And to keep Reno happy Holder maneuvered to send Elian back to the godless hellhole Elian’s mother died trying to escape.

About two weeks before the raid, Tim Russert of Meet the Press asked Holder, “You wouldn’t send a SWAT team in the dark of night to kidnap the child, in effect?” Holder answered, “No, we don’t expect anything like that to happen.”

The day after the seizure, Holder appeared again with Russert, who asked, “Why such a dramatic change in position?” Said the utterly compromised Holder in response, “I’m not sure I’d call it a dramatic change, We waited ’til five in the morning, just before dawn.” Huh?

The media made the job of the Clinton White House a whole lot easier. By early afternoon of Easter Saturday, newsrooms across the nation swapped out the dramatic photo of the raid—which would win a well deserved Pulitzer Prize—with a photo of Elian reuniting with his father, now apparently a “Maryland man,” at Joint Based Andrews.

As the Time magazine cover below suggests, the media uniformly pushed the KGB-worthy raid on the relatives’ humble home in Miami down the memory hole. They much preferred the story of a blissful father-son reunion, perhaps the last time the media endorsed the father’s rights movement. In a presidential election year, of course, the media had less interest in the father than they did in keeping a Democrat in the White House.

In that a three-judge federal panel had ruled that Elian could not go back to Cuba until he was granted an asylum hearing, he and his father remained in the US until the court ruled. During this time, Elian’s Miami relatives were turned away when they tried to see the boy. The media pretended that Castro was not dictating the rules of the game.

The case turned on the right of the relatives to request an asylum hearing on behalf of the boy. On June 1, 2000, the Clinton-friendly 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Elián was too young to file for asylum; only his father could speak for him, and the relatives lacked legal standing. On June 28, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review the decision. And Elian was returned to the loving embrace of the man who was every Cuban boy’s father—and likely Justin Trudeau’s as well.

In truth, Elian had plenty of due process. Happily for the Clintons it ultimately went their way. If it did not, as noted, they were prepared to ignore it. As a result of the White House’s suck up to Castro, Vice President Al Gore would get plenty of due process as well.

Until April 22, 2000, Gore was the odds-on favorite to win the presidency. In 1996, Clinton had won Florida by a comfortable margin. Gore expected to do the same, but the raid on Elian’s Miami home reminded those Cuban-Americans drifting to the left that Democrats were not necessarily their friends.

The shift in their vote gave George W. Bush just enough margin to be declared the winner by the U.S. Supreme Court. If I remember right, the Democrats did not exactly applaud that bit of due process, now did they?

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