Coming to a city near you, the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement ushering in a reign of terror with the stated goal of detaining and deporting violent criminals and/or gang members who are also subject to deportation.
For those of us in Raleigh and Wake County, apparently that day is today and the next few if rumours are to believed.
If the script follows the one used in Los Angeles and Chicago and most recently over the weekend just down the motorway in Charlotte, we can expect to see roving squads of masked ICE agents in full paramilitary gear and their various supporting henchmen violently detaining if not arresting people suspected of being illegal immigrants.
The only question is how long it’ll be before we start seeing viral videos of people being violently assaulted in the name of “law enforcement” who were only contacted based on the colour of their skin which the Supreme Court has *REPEATEDLY* held is not sufficient to by itself to establish the “reasonable articulable suspicion (RAS)” or probable cause that a crime has been committed, is being committed, or will be committed by the suspect as required by the interpretation of the Fourth Amendment in Terry v Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).
If the recent past is anything to by, I don’t think it’ll take terribly long at all.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Amendment IV — United States Constitution
One of the most depressing themes that I’ve seen in the comments on such new stories and videos is this very persistent belief amongst the constitutionally ignorant “lawyers” who got their law degree from the U of Tube that the legal protections and rights afforded by the Constitution do not apply to people who are in this country illegally or without documents establishing citizenship or permanent residence or leave to remain via a visa.
The wording is crystal clear for anyone who wishes to comprehend it…”the people” means every person physically present in this country and/or subject to it’s jurisdiction whether they have leave to be here or not or are a citizen or not.
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Amendment V — United States Constitution
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Amendment XIV, Section 1 — United States Constitution
Notice how the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments reinforce the rights of a “person” against being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law and in the case of the Fourteen extends to them the equal protection of the laws.
It is absolutely critical that the Constitution applies to every person who happens to be legally in the jurisdiction of the United States or else the Constitution’s guarantees of basic human rights and due process of law are rendered meaningless if the government can simply ignore the Constitution when they find it an inconvenient impediment to their policies and actions.
Three amendments and the mountains of case law on the subject underscores just how important it is.
To be clear, I don’t think anyone in their right mind wishes violent criminals who are eligible for deportation to remain in this country any longer than they absolutely must be here.
Policies across successive administrations that have allowed these crims to be out on bail with not much more than a pinky promise (with their other hand having crossed fingers behind their back!) to appear in court to answer to their charges have always had a tension with the lack of desire of the taxpayers to fund appropriate and humane facilities to house these individuals whilst their cases are progressing through the glacial pace of the court system in accordance with due process of law.
Inconsistent cooperation of local law enforcement with ICE detainers (most often under Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act) has only exacerbated ICE’s reaction taking matters into their own hands. For many years, the Wake County Sheriff was a cooperating 287(g) agency but recent elections have brought in new leaders who do have a legitimate question at law that hasn’t been litigated in the courts (as far as I know) about the legality of ICE detainers when a suspect has successfully made bail (or indeed the practicality of holding them given the overcrowding in the current jail and no additional funding from the government or the rate payers to build additional jails to handle the extra jail-eligible population).
I’m also not naive enough to believe that everyone who is detained by ICE/Border Patrol in these crackdowns are going to be compliant and cooperative with an investigative process that also seems to be somewhat random and outside of the usual norms employed by actual police units (ICE agents are often labeled as police but they do not have police powers for investigating state and local crimes and they still require warrants actually signed by a judge to enter a residence and effect an arrest and their DHS “warrant-like” documents that are not signed by judges are *NOT* sufficient to substitute for a real judicial warrant).
There have been plenty of viral videos of people having the window of their car busted and being violently ripped out of the seat and thrown to the deck for handcuffing or ZIP tying their hands. The most disturbing videos were out of Chicago which saw these masked ICE agents violently assaulting women and children in their zeal to arrest illegal immigrants.
The hallmarks of that news reporting is that escalation to force tended to be very quick and the relevant amendments to the Constitution seemed to take a back seat to instilling terror in the Latino population at large and it seems breathtakingly successful at that.
In fact, a taco truck I see daily in my various comings and goings was shut today at a time when they usually are doing a quite lively business. I have no idea what the immigration status of the people who run that food truck is nor is it really my business but when they’re shutting their business for fear of being rounded up (whether legally or not) tells me all I need know about the real aim of these operations.
That rather begs the observation that Latinos are the targets today but what about tomorrow? The Supreme Court has made it’s disdain for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act quite plain so it seems that Jim Crow 2.0 may well be coming hard on the heels of a likely gutting of that act based on the tenor of the questions from the MAGA justices. They’ve also targeted the LGBTQIA+ community (the transgender community in particular) so is it too much of a stretch of the imagination to reckon on who might also be targeted down the road? Or indeed any group the government decides is not worthy of basic human dignity and respect for their rights under the Constitution?
We’ve seen that play out before…in fact, there was a rather famous poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller dealing with just that topic. You might have heard of it…or even thought very hard about it if they came for you.
Is that who we really are as a society? Is that who we *REALLY* want to be or how we want to be known?
The online comments from the keyboard warriors would make you think so but they don’t tend to represent the actual mood of the country that overwhelmingly believes in justice with due process and the rule of law as well as a path to citizenship for the undocumented who are already here (with hefty fines/fees and a long period of time in order to get legal provided they’ve kept their noses clean to that point).
It might well be emotionally satisfying to some people to round all up of the illegal aliens and chuck them out of the country summarily as DHS and ICE/Border Protection seem incentivised to do with monthly quotas of deportations but infamous cases like Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation to a concentration camp of strict regime in El Salvador that he’d fled fearing for his life and had a court order barring his being deported there have been reaffirmed by the courts including the Supreme Court that the government was still obligated to respect his rights to equal protection and due process of the laws.
But even were we able to do so, that policy has significant legal and economic consequences as many illegal immigrants are employed (if not notoriously exploited!) by US employers whilst immigration authorities have turned a blind eye toward enforcement. Those immigrants who are not paid under the table in cash (often at much less than the legally required minimum wage) still have employment taxes such as income tax and FICA withheld from their pay for benefits they will not be able to access and also pay sales taxes at point of sale. That’s a huge hit to the various government treasuries that will have to be made up somehow.
Farmers in particular have enjoyed generally lax immigration and employee rights enforcement particularly during the growing and harvesting seasons. If the average farm were restricted to only US citizens, their chief complaint is that there aren’t enough citizens available and willing to do backbreaking work at much less than minimum wage and farms will lose big in competition with foreign competitors who can get away with paying slave labour rates to their workers and raping the environment in the process.
I’ll confess that I enjoy seeing a sovereign citizen’s window busted and them finding their way to non-consensual guesting in the custody cells of the local constabulary as much as anyone else but except in extreme circumstances which often led to a Federal civil rights lawsuit afterward, those detentions are invariably done with the Fourth Amendment’s requirement of RAS and after many more warnings than they really deserve before the encounter escalates from talking to force.
Speaking of provocation, one of the most disturbing aspects of these operations is that the agents involved are invariably wearing masks and often refuse to identify themselves or their agency.
It’s one thing to protect the identity of an undercover officer and those subject to violent retribution but our law enforcement tradition in this country has generally been conducted openly without concealing identity. There are plenty of officers that will just point to their name with a flippant “right here” which they would never do in a court of law for fear of being held in contempt by the judge but they are very much the minority where most law enforcement officers are professional and polite and have no problem identifying themselves because they’re acting within their powers and departmental procedures.
If the more violent ICE agents who seem as hair-triggered in temperament and prone to violence as the gang members they’re supposedly apprehending in the name of the law are anything to go by, then the policies in place at the Department of Homeland Security have taken an even more dire turn away from the Constitutional norms and protections than we’ve been led to believe.
That tends to affect the perception of their activities amongst the citizenry that their actions really can’t stand the light of day and the likelihood they’ll be held properly accountable for what they do during an encounter is even closer to zero than the era of qualified immunity and internal affairs policing themselves already is.
Excessively violent masked agents who refuse to identify and conduct themselves professionally that are not able to be held accountable are the harbingers of the police state that polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of American citizens of all political persuasions say they absolutely loathe.
In authoritarian regimes which ours seems perilously close to becoming at times, the masked agent of the government often wears the disguise because they do not wish to be known as a collaborator with that government once the tyrant and his regime inevitably falls. Known collaborators or suspected ones don’t tend to do so well in the aftermath and usually the efforts at hiding their identity tends to be for naught…it’s generally not hard to determine who are the prisoners and who are the warders.
History has shown that the next step for such “shock troops” is to upgrade the styling of their uniforms once official state sanction to their activities has been achieved and any dissent violently quelled and put down.
Talk about company we as a society really don’t want to keep! 🙁