What a 19th-century slave ship can tell us about one of Trump’s biggest attempts to defy the rule of law

Imagine a president trying to stir up his political base, many of whom believe that anyone who isn’t white cannot be a true American. Imagine a president willing to defy a court order and take a person from American soil and send him to a hostile country for a lifetime of harsh treatment.

No, this is not the story of President Donald Trump sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to be incarcerated in El Salvador’s most notorious prison in March. This is the story of the Amistad.

In 1839, Sengbe Pieh, also known as Joseph Cinque, along with hundreds of others from the West African village of Mendeland, was kidnapped by Portuguese human traffickers. Cinque was brought to Cuba, then a Spanish colony, and sold to Spanish plantation owners.

The owners put Cinque and 52 other captives on a small boat called the Amistad (meaning “friendship” in Spanish) to transport them to the other side of the island. Cinque escaped from shackles and, with the help of several other captives, commandeered the boat after killing four of the six crew members.

After several weeks at sea attempting to sail home to Africa, the Amistad was captured by United States naval personnel off the coast of Long Island, and the former captives were incarcerated in a Connecticut jail.

The Spanish government requested that President Martin Van Buren return the captives to the plantation owners. Van Buren, anxious to appease the Southern states before the next election, agreed to extradite Cinque to Cuba.

However, Cinqueʼs story ended in freedom because several Americans joined him in his fight for justice. First, a group of abolitionists led by Lewis Tappan, a wealthy white merchant, formed the Amistad Committee to raise funds for Cinque’s legal defense.

Next, a brave federal district court judge, Andrew Judson, withstood intense pressure from the Van Buren administration and ruled that Cinque and the others were “born free, and ever since have been, and still of right are free.”

He ordered Van Buren to send them back to their homes in Mendeland.

When Van Buren ordered the United States attorney to appeal Judson’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, John Quincy Adams agreed to represent Cinque and the others.

As a former president, then-member of Congress, and the son of another former president, John Adams, he was uniquely able to speak with authority on how Cinque’s capture violated the founding principles of the nation. Adams argued that to permit Van Buren to seize Cinque and ship him to Cuba would pose a fundamental threat to all Americans.

Adams warned the court that “any authority for such a proceeding in the case of these unfortunate Africans, [would] be equally available, if any President thought proper to exercise it, to seize and send off forty citizens of the United States.” Adams then asked, “Will this court give it a judicial sanction?”

The Supreme Court did not.

Justice Joseph Story authored the court’s opinion, which declared that the Africans were “to be free, and be dismissed from the custody of the court.”

The court, however, did not provide for Cinque’s return to his family in Mendeland.

The new president, John Tyler, refused to transport any of the successful litigants. But the Amistad Committee came to Cinque’s rescue once again. They raised funds, commissioned a vessel, and facilitated the safe return of the Africans to their homes.

Justice was not achieved easily in the Amistad case. It took the courage of Cinque. It required the financial and public support of members of the Amistad Committee. It was only made possible by the willingness of a federal district judge to conduct an open hearing consistent with due process and focused on ascertaining the actual proven facts.

It required a lawyer, a person of ultimate privilege, to be willing to take and argue an unpopular case. And it would not have happened without Supreme Court justices who were truly committed to the rule of law.

President Trump has stated that Abrego Garcia is “never coming back” to the United States, but just as Americans stood up for due process almost two centuries ago, they can do so again.

Abrego Garcia, like all persons in this country, has the right to tell his story, and due process demands that the courts determine the actual facts.

He should not be silenced by a notorious El Salvadoran prison, nor should he be denied his day in court by a defiant American president.

Michael Meyerson is the DLA Piper Professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Michael Higginbotham is an adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania‘s Carey School of Law and the Laurence Katz Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law.