Screw Your Due Process

The Constitution is a shield for our citizens, not a sword for foreign pirates.

OPINION: By Walter Curt

Spare me the crocodile tears for cartel crews riding steel coffins toward our shores. The left, and their favorite accessory, the squishy right, want to turn cartel runners into sympathetic defendants with full courtroom choreography before we’re allowed to stop a drug submarine in international waters. No. When you aim poison at our kids, you’re not a defendant; you’re a hostile actor. And hostile actors don’t get a court date before they get interdicted.

I’ve buried too many friends to pretend this is an academic debate. My generation didn’t mostly lose people to car wrecks; we lost them to fentanyl and its friends—one pill, one line, and the funeral home is out of space. In my town, we literally needed ice trucks when the morgue overflowed. Tell those parents about “due process” for the crew racing toward our coastline with a hull full of death. See how far your seminar logic gets you at three in the morning in a kitchen lit only by the refrigerator and a mother’s sobs.

We track these vessels from the moment they slip off the coast, we know what they are, what they’re carrying, and where they’re going. “You’re in grave danger,” Secretary Rubio said about running drug boats. Good. Be afraid. That’s the point. We’ve let the cartels make fear a one-way street, fear in our neighborhoods, at our schools, in our ERs, while we act like the only thing that can move faster than a narco-sub is a lawyer. The result is a national ritual of handwringing, candlelight vigils, and teen-sized caskets. Enough.

The constitutional set loves to lecture about process, as if Madison wanted American juries empaneled on the high seas to secure the liberties of a Venezuelan smuggler in a scuttling sub. Read the thing. Article I, Section 8 empowers Congress “to define and punish piracies and felonies committed on the high seas.” The Founders hanged pirates and seized their ships. They issued letters of marque. They did not ship rum runners back to London for a polite hearing while the powder stayed dry. That older, sterner wisdom wasn’t cruelty; it was clarity.

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Clarity is what we’ve lost. We’ve confused courtroom rights with battlefield realities. Due process is an American promise to our people in our courts after lawful arrest. It is not a magical force field for armed foreign operatives who got caught red-handed mid-crime in international waters. You want due process? Surrender. Heave to. Be boarded. Live to see a judge. But if you punch the throttle on a semi-submersible full of fentanyl and try to outrun the Coast Guard, you have announced yourself as a combatant. At that point the “process” is called rules of engagement.

And spare me the pearl-clutching from Republican consultants who talk like defense attorneys for a cartel HR department. The “sensible” GOP position usually boils down to this: we’ll pat the war on the head, send a sternly worded letter to the State Department, and demand that our sailors fling themselves onto a pitching deck at night to preserve the litigative comfort of men who dissolve teenagers from Ohio and Texas from the inside out. This isn’t prudence. It’s moral laziness wrapped in legalese.

Call them what they are: transnational terrorists. They destabilize sovereign nations, assassinate politicians, run paramilitary columns, and flood the United States with a weapon that kills at scale. A civilized country treats that as war by other means. That means interdiction that doesn’t end with high-speed chases and polite warnings. It means disabling shots, sunk hulls, seized assets, and a simple iron rule: if you bring death to American families, the most dangerous part of your job should be the job itself.

“But some of those crewmen are poor fishermen coerced into service.” I’ve heard it. Evil is excellent at conscripting the poor into its supply chain. The answer isn’t to let the shipments sail because the bosses outsource risk. The answer is to dry up the demand for runners by making the trip a losing bet: surrender and see a courtroom, or resist and risk a watery grave. When the whisper among smugglers becomes, “Don’t run north; the Americans will sink you,” then we can talk about compassion. Mercy that invites more coffins is not mercy at all.

There’s a broader lesson here—unfashionable but true. Peace is kept by fear. The fear of swift, predictable consequences is the only language cartels speak. They shouldn’t fall asleep to the lullaby of legal delays; they should live with the hum of a drone overhead, the reality that the boat beneath their feet might stop being a boat in about six seconds. That is how you protect American teenagers you’ll never meet. That’s how you honor the empty chairs at Thanksgiving that this “process” crowd never seems to see.

None of this means we discard our law. It means we remember what our law is for. The Constitution exists to secure the blessings of liberty to our people, not to provide procedural air cover to narco-pirates. Keep the courtroom for those we capture after they stand down. Keep the appeals for those who submit to our jurisdiction. But on the high seas, as the wake cuts and the packages stack, the choice belongs to the men on that boat: surrender and live, or fight and sink.

So yes, screw your due process for cartel boats. Save it for the citizen falsely accused, the cop under scrutiny, the neighbor who made a terrible mistake but came quietly. Save it for people under our flag. The men who aim a submersible full of poison at our children have stepped outside that promise by their own hand. They chose their side. It’s time we chose ours.