There is enough going on around immigration policy that it warrants its own entry.
As a step to making America great again, we have decided to crack down on illegal immigrants, which can include:
- Illegal aliens who are committing crimes. Everybody I know is in favor of deporting these criminals. Unfortunately, this is not the current focus.
- Illegal aliens who are not committing crimes (including those who came to the US as children, and tourists overstaying their visas).
- People who are legally allowed to be here, including students, business people, and tourists, who for whatever reason have their status changed without them knowing and through little or no fault of their own. Some examples include:
- A Canadian citizen whose work visa was cancelled for no good reason (spent 2 weeks in various ICE facilities).
- A New Zealand citizen living in Washington State with valid work authorization (spent 3 weeks in a Texas ICE facility).
- Innocent people who are legally entitled to be here, but for some reason got swept up by ICE.
Trump has increased ICE’s budget between 400% and 1,000%, making it more funded than both the FBI and the DEA. The new enforcement behaviors damage the rule of law for the following reasons:
Those detained/deported are often denied due process
My Facebook feed is filled with claims that habeas corpus and due process are only guaranteed for citizens and not for non-citizens or criminals. My two responses are:
- How do we know that they are criminals or non-citizens unless they are allowed due process? We don’t deny due process just because a person is accused of a crime.
- Saying that due process only applies to citizens is laughable. While the constitution does indicate that a few rights are reserved for citizens (such as the right to vote), the majority apply to everybody in the country. Furthermore, the Declaration of Independence states that the right to liberty is an inalienable (i.e. non-revocable) right bestowed by God on all humanity, so how can we deny non-citizens fair justice?
Is it legal for me to murder or rob a tourist with no consequences because they have no rights? What if they were jay walking when I did so (i.e. committing a crime)? The idea is laughable.
What bogles my mind is that we not only deport people without a trial, but we may send people to prison for life without a trial. ICE can use whatever heuristic they want to label a person as a gang member (such as too many tattoos), and then they are not only deported – they may be sent to a foreign prison (where the US argues that we have no right to ask for them back). This can happen to anybody that is stopped on the street for whatever reason – it is not only reserved for those that were caught in the act of committing a crime or with known gang affiliations.
Once in ICE custody, detainees may be transferred frequently from one facility to another, making it harder for loved ones to find the detainee and to obtain council.
When they are allowed a trial, they are not provided counsel, and the judge is an employee of the Justice department and are selected by a political appointee. Since Trump has taken office, more than 100 immigration judges have been fired or have resigned due to political pressures.
An interesting quirk of immigration court is that normally dismissing a case is a good thing for the defendant. In immigration court, however, once the proceedings stop without a definitive “not guilty” ruling, the defendant loses all legal protections and is eligible to be re-arrested and become a candidate for expedited removal. It is common for ICE agents to wait outside the courtroom doors to re-arrest when cases are dismissed.
The punishment is often cruel and unusual
Crossing the border illegally for the first time is a misdemeanor (they are allowed to apply for asylum, however, which is a separate legal process). Re-entering the US after being removed is a felony. Simply living in the US without authorization is a civil offense and not a criminal offense. However, Trump wants to deter future immigrants by being overly punitive to all detainees.
ICE has a massive budget to build detention centers, and these are often built to be overly punitive. A recent example of this is Alligator Alcatraz, where the conditions were atrocious. That made it so popular that people started selling merch.
These facilities are notoriously crowded and unsanitary, and due to the backlog caused by the lack of immigration courts, a person can literally spend years living in these facilities while awaiting trial (for a civil offense). Legal noncitizens usually have the longest detentions stays.
But deportation is often not enough for Trump – he sometimes wants them to rot in a foreign prison. To speed up deportation hurdles, we found that it may be cheaper to simply send then to a prison in El Salvador, Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, or Eswatini. This has been done without even charging them with a crime and often without any due process.
To quote Adam Serwer: “Cruelty is the point”
ICE commits many offenses
They have a daily arrest quota of 3,000 people, meaning that they can be very liberal in whom they round up. They claim that they need no probable cause to detain people, they argue for the ability to racially profile, and it is common for them to detain US citizens and legal residents. When they do detain a citizen, it can often be for days and then they report that the arrest was due to the detainee attacking the officer (even when video shows differently).
ICE is definitely pushing the boundaries regarding what is legal, but as they are quickly becoming Trump’s personal police force, they will always be protected under him.
Many deportations are arbitrary
Even when people are entirely legal, you can be deported if Trump doesn’t like you.
For example, Mahmoud Khalil was a permanent resident from Syria who attended Columbia University who was deported because he participated in pro-Palestinian protests. He didn’t break any laws, but President Trump wanted to quell free speech and argued that protesting Isreal was antisemitic and that by extension, he was aiding Hamas and was hence aiding a terrorist organization (which he absolutely wasn’t doing – he was just protesting stuff that Trump disagrees with). An immigration judge was forced to deem him deportable when Marco Rubio said that his continued presence poses “adverse foreign policy consequences”.
You don‘t have to agree with his views to recognize that deporting people for speaking their opinions is very un-American (or it used to be?)
The focus is no longer on reducing crime
Speaking on Alligator Alcatraz, Trump said “But very soon, this facility will house some of the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet.”
It’s a typical Trump soundbite, but is it true? Besides the fact that legal noncitizens on average spend the longest time in ICE detention, the focus isn’t really on catching criminals any more.
ICE officials must arrest 3,000 people every day (having a quota is insane). If you are a fisherman and you have a daily quota based on the number of fish caught, are you going after the big game fish or the smaller fish who are more plentiful? Catching the hardened criminals (i.e. the most vicious people on the planet) takes a lot more effort than sweeping an apartment complex, so they are focusing almost exclusively on the little fish. The average ICE detention center is much more likely to be filled with law-abiding grandmas than with hardened criminals.
If you had to meet a numbers quota, which fish would you focus on?
Summary
A system that allows innocent people who are legally allowed to be here to spend a year in an ICE detention facility or deported to a foreign prison is antithetical to the rule of law. You may think that being white and being born here protects you from all of this. You may even agree with the many deportations and the cruel ways that they are executed. But if they can do this to other people, don’t think that it won’t eventually be done to you or somebody that you care about. Either we all have rights, or none of us have rights.
