"As a matter of law, ICE cannot assert its civil immigration enforcement authority to arrest and/or detain a U.S. citizen." https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/when-ice-tries-...
If my very limited understanding of this is correct, this is a perfect real-life example of a Catch-22: citizens have no right to an attorney if arrested by immigration because immigration cannot legally arrest citizens.
This cannot be simply asserted by ICE. To revoke naturalized citizenship, the government must initiate denaturalization proceedings in U.S. District Court in front of an Article III judge.
But ICE also has criminal enforcement authority, where applicable.
Wow, that's scary. Has this been recently challenged?
I’d expect minimum statutory damages for this sort of thing to be north of $10K / day, paid up front, and garnished from ICE’s payroll budget. However, I don’t make the rules.
Heh. It's funny what people think about government sometimes.
This is nothing. Read about what the IRS can legally do to you, without any recourse, or just search for horror stories on the internet, as they actually do those things regularly. Blocking all your bank accounts, then convicting you based on non-payment is normal for them.
That's one of the problems of people in general. If you give people essentially unlimited power (that's what Congress has, in theory), they're not going to be nice about using that power.
That means that government departments that see it as their mission to fix things in society, immigration, mental health, child support, veteran's affairs, ... well, frankly it is pretty well known among lawyers that things like constant human rights violations, outright criminal direct abuse (rape, beatings, ...), absurd imprisonment (e.g. solitary confinement for long periods), they're part of normal operation for a lot of these departments. For instance, did you know the odds of a kid getting raped or sexually assaulted are actually higher in the care of CPA than with abusive parents ? Despite, of course, that the whole point of CPA is to lower these occurrences ? The same goes with metal-health related suicides: they're actually higher when patients are "being treated" in mental health hospitals that without any care (which means, no forced care).
People just seem utterly unable to admit or believe that attempts to fix things are making matters worse, so these things just do not get resolved.
So a judge has 2 choices (in most states):
Either he ignores you or gives you some token amount without making a big fuss out of it, for some bullshit reason (not for illegally detaining you, but for some bullshit but legal reason like illegally charging you some fee or something).
The other choice a judge has is to hold the people who actually did this personally liable ... and assigns real monetary damages. Not on the government, as the government explicitly forbade them from doing this, on the individuals. This will open those individuals to a slam-shut kidnapping case, which if the victim plays it correctly will lead to them receiving prison sentences. They cannot claim they didn't do it, because it's part of another court case's conclusion that they did it, including that it was illegal.
So a judge can either almost ignore you, or utterly destroy the lives of some 20 government employees that just did what they were told to do. At this point, you have to understand, those government employees' lives are utterly destroyed: they are very likely to go to jail, they'll have 6 or 7 figures in debt (enough to almost certainly lose all their possessions), garnished wages for a decade at least and can never work for government again (in other words, on top of everything else, they're fired from their job).
A reasonable person would say that a judge needs a third option: a way to tell the government that they fucked up lawmaking, assign damages based on that, and that laws need to come with clear details on what to do. That a rule like "no citizen may be arrested" must come with a clear and foolproof way to distinguish citizens from non-citizens to be valid, but judges are explicitly forbidden from doing this (you might even say the very definition of their job is to NEVER do this).
Why are the rules like this ? Government, the big exception to employer responsibility ? To save the government a buck.
Needless to say, unless there was a daily rape regimen, a judge will not do this. Frankly, even then it's probably not a reasonable thing to do.
> Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport.
So, carry your passport on you personally at all times? And hope you never lose your wallet/purse?
It doesn't matter if you're actually a citizen. If the government refuses to admit your citizenship, how do you get them to admit your rights apply?
I would love to get more clarification on this as well. It seems to me that if there is doubt about your citizenship, we should lean towards better safe than sorry and just grant you a lawyer, period.
The US justice system is (ostensibly, if not always in practice) based on the idea that protecting innocent people is more important than punishing guilty people. If you're being tried to see if you're a citizen, I would prefer we assume you're innocent until proven guilty and grant you a lawyer.
Is the reality as bad as people are suggesting? Is there some kind of reasoning behind this?
If the US thinks the bill of rights should only apply to citizens of the US, the US is morally bankrupt.