Ваши документы, пожалуйста! (“Your documents, please!” in Russian)
When the Soviet Union was a thing, this order could come at you at any time and in any place usually from a KGB officer whether you were in the Родина (“homeland”) or behind the Iron Curtain.
Compliance was compulsory and you’d best be quick about it lest that KGB officer get the idea that you’re not being cooperative and decided to whisk you off to the interrogation suites (or worse!) for more intense and usually quite prolonged questioning.
The phrase that you were absolutely dreading to hear was the one that is the title to this post…“your documents are not in order!”
That was when things were going to go very badly for you and your neighbours and family would be strongly cautioned against asking questions about where you’ve gone or when (and usually if) you’d ever return.
Think about this for a moment…how many American citizens routinely go about their day-to-day business with their passport or birth certificate in their immediate possession to prove they are American citizens upon demand to some heavily armed “agent” from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the hopes of avoiding being whisked off to some detention facility or gulag?
Would the thought of carrying those documents everywhere they went even occur to them?
Even during the darkest days of the Cold War, Americans were free to move about the country from state to state without showing their identity documents as well as signed permission from their local kommisar for them to travel in the first place.
Showing identification to board a plane didn’t really become a thing until the mid-1990s. Many younger readers wouldn’t remember that your name wasn’t on the paper ticket you used to fly and so if your plans changed, you could resell that ticket rather than go through the hassle and expense of rebooking your flight at the ticket counter at the airport or in the city or at a travel agent’s office and it wasn’t unheard of for a corporate ticket to be handed to whoever was going to fly that day.
The airlines absolutely hated that system and thus lobbied for the passenger name to be printed on the tickets and maintained in the reservations systems and eventually added a requirement that it be matched to identification to the delight of law enforcement, particularly the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) when it was stood up in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
But even when the name and ID requirement came into force for airline travel, the average traveler who doesn’t traffic in conspiracy theories on a regular basis didn’t see that as the beginning of the police state in this country.
The decision in NOEM v. VASQUEZ PERDOMO by the Supreme Court to lift an injunction against ICE agents engaging in racial/ethnic profiling to effect detentions that was repeatedly ruled bang out-of-order by multiple rulings from earlier iterations of the same Supreme Court means that traditional Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizures by the government are now meaningless when it comes to Latinos who often proudly speak Spanish as is their right and heritage who happen to be in locations where people congregate to pick up day labour assignments often at low wages.
Do you look Latino? You’re fair game!
Do you speak Spanish or some other language? There is a target on your back!
Are you picking up gig assignments in order to get by? Better have your citizenship papers in hand and hope that the ICE agent will actually take them seriously!
It’s not inconceivable to me that people I love and care deeply for could well be detained merely for how they look and the fact that they speak Spanish at home as much as they do English (or what passes for English in that Boston-influenced dialect!) without so much as due process or a by your leave.
Will it matter to some ill-trained and barely educated ICE agent that’s joined these roving posses because the money is right and they’re given guns, armour, and the Aegis of the Supreme Court now allowing blatantly unconstitutional behaviour to persecute people who don’t look or sound like them that there’s quite a few Latinos in this country from Puerto Rico or of Puerto Rican descent who are *AMERICAN CITIZENS*?
Maybe my Latino familia might get lucky and the detention is brief and painless.
That seems to be the dream world that Justice Kavanaugh lives in where his concurrence completely ignores the record of fact finding established by the Federal district court currently litigating this case which is manifestly against how the appellate courts are supposed to act in practise.
It’s bad enough that this Supreme Court is routinely ignoring the record developed in lower courts which by precedent established by the Supreme Court should be shown great deference to the record of fact developed in trial because those courts are the courts of original jurisdiction in which the facts and evidence are introduced and refined in the crucible of the law to come to an opinion that balances the equities of the parties and at least attempts to come to a just resolution.
The only time the appellate courts are supposed to ignore the factual record is if the lower court actually made an error in it’s application of the law which doesn’t seem to be what’s happened in this case.
This is precisely why this abuse of the “emergency docket” in which the entrenched majority on the Supreme Court are issuing heavily ideological opinions based on little to no briefing and argument, no amicus briefs to bring perspective to the Court’s deliberation and often the opinions are terse one paragraph orders with little to no explanation.
The order is rather exceptional in that Justice Kavanaugh makes it very clear that he is perfectly comfortable ignoring the extensive record developed in the lower court of masked gangs of ICE agents rounding up Latinos without anything approaching the customary standard of reasonable articulable suspicion or probable cause required by the Fourth Amendment and detaining them until they prove their citizenship.
Ваши документы, пожалуйста!
If the people they’re terrorising are even lucky enough to get a question or two from the ICE agent before they’re detained and transported to an interrogation suite. Some aren’t even getting even the customary identification as police officers or ICE agents before they’re detained (occasionally rather violently)!
If they’re going to act like the KGB officers of old, they may as well start speaking in Russian as they start demanding identification documents of whoever they feel “doesn’t look or sound right”.
Does this really sound like the United States of America we’ve all been brought up to believe in through the years and that thousands upon thousands of people through the centuries have fought for to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution? And more than a few of those brave souls who made that ultimate sacrifice were first-generation immigrants who had become American citizens!
My father has to be rolling over in his grave in Arlington seeing ICE and this administration not only adopt the methods of the KGB but the Supreme Court routinely allowing a breathtaking array of authoritarian if not dictatorial actions and executive orders to stand in spite of the clear violations of the Constitution that is supposed to apply to all persons in the jurisdiction of this country equally!
In fairness, illegal immigration is a big problem but it’s hardly a new one. Anyone who had even a vague awareness of politics and government remembers the last major immigration amnesty enacted by the Federal government way back in 1986.
My fellow citizens, that’d be during the presidency of Ronald Reagan who is so beloved and deified but largely misunderstood by the modern incarnation of ultra right-wing “conservatives”.
Successive administrations have either kicked the immigration can down the road or engaged in the occasional crackdown and reign of terror to boost their standing in the polls amongst those who really fail to comprehend what that green coloured Jersey girl standing in the harbour of New York truly represents.
Occasionally you might see Congress offer up a more thoughtful and humane way of bringing people (and let’s not forget that these are HUMAN BEINGS we’re talking about here!) and their immigration status into the light such as the DACA and DREAM Act proposals.
No one is suggesting that illegal immigrants who engage in criminal activities in this country shouldn’t be apprehended and chucked out of the country once they’ve had the due process that at least at one point was guaranteed them by the Constitution in the 14th Amendment. By all means, let’s get rid of the drug dealers and the human traffickers and other criminals who don’t have legal status in this country.
But that’s not what’s really happening on the ground in Los Angeles and Washington and coming soon to Chicago and other cities that quelle surprise happen to be home to large majorities of people who favour the party opposing the current administration.
That makes the operation seem far less about actually reducing crime and restoring the rule of law and more like terrorising minority groups.
The world has seen pogroms such as this in the past and they’ve never ended well for those who have been persecuted…nor does the march toward dictatorship tend to stop with just those groups of people when the population gets used to blatant violations of the Posse Comitatus Act or the military being brought in to occupy the cities becoming the norm rather than the exception only employed in the most extreme of emergency situations.
It seems to me that the tools of dictatorship and the police state and the subjugation of historical lessons learnt the hard way and the wholesale violations of American civil rights and values are not the country we’d like to believe we were nor is it the one we really want to see come into play.
Six members of the Supreme Court decided they’re perfectly fine with violations of the Constitution and civil rights and only one of them had the guts to actually say the quiet part of what that majority really wants to see come into being out loud.
They might well want to think it through very carefully. Dictators rarely have use for courts, Supreme or otherwise.
The only reason that the Supreme Court has any supremacy at all is because the lower courts willingly adhere to their rulings but the Supreme Court has no way of enforcing their will should the lower courts figure out that SCOTUS has completely lost the plot and their rulings are blatantly violating the Constitution they swore to preserve, protect, and defend.
One can dare to dream they wake up from this madness that currently consumes six of the Justices before it’s too late.