ICE Told It Can Detain Millions and Deny Them Access to Due Process

Investigative reporters at The Washington Post have learned that immigration agencies have been cleared to detain people without allowing them any right to apply to a court for a bond hearing that could free them to continue their lives while waiting for their cases to be adjudicated. With the administration's accelerated sweeps all over the country by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) crowding the detention facilities, and far too few immigration courts and judges to process them, ICE will simply bypass these steps and ship detainees to one of its 200 detention centers where they could wait many months extending to years waiting to be heard.

The head of ICE, Todd Lyons, wrote in a July 8 memo that the departments of Homeland Security and Justice had “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities” and determined that immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody" where they will wait “for the duration of their removal proceedings." The American Immigration Lawyers Association has heard from it members that denial of bond hearings has already begun in several states.

To meet the 3,000 arrests a day demanded by the administration's most extreme immigrant xenophobe, deputy chief of staff and homeland security advisor Stephen Miller, the hordes of people ICE and other federal agents are grabbing at random will inevitably include American citizens.

This week, perhaps seeming to comport with a Supreme Court mandate in April, a second ICE memo says it will give notice to certain individuals facing deportation that they have just six hours to try to reach a lawyer.

This adheres to the Court's April ruling not at all. It said individuals in deportation proceedings are entitled to due process and an opportunity to challenge their deportation through a habeas corpus petition:

“[N]otice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

The ICE memo offering six hours is cynically impudent. The Court should step in to remind ICE of what it said 80 years ago, that “notice which is a mere feint is not due process.” But will it? More on that later.

Immigration law says those here illegally “shall be detained” but the law's application has always pertained only to those who had just crossed the border and would be immediately deported. But in its announced policy of denying an individual any access to a judge and a bond hearing,
Narciso Barranco, a landscaper trimming bushes outside
an IHOP when he was here wrestled to the ground.
Agents say he attacked them with a weapon, but video
shows he was only carrying his weedwhacker.
He has lived in this country for a long time. He has
three sons who served in the United States Marine Corps.

ICE now intends to apply the statute to immigrants already here — families with schoolchildren who have been in country for years, working productive jobs, integrated into American communities, paying taxes.

Lawyers referred to in the Post article say that the totalitarian powers the administration has given ICE to deny bond appeal have no stated limit and could apply to the millions of people Trump contemplates. The “Big Beautiful Bill” allots a whopping $45 billion to expand immigrant detention capacity. We are building concentration camps.

During World War II, President Roosevelt ordered that persons in the United States of Japanese descent, out of fear that some could be spies for Japan, be rounded up and herded into internment camps for the duration of the war. It has been regarded a shameful forsaking of civil rights ever since. About 120,000 people were incarcerated. The Trump plan for millions will exceed the Japanese transgression many times over to the extent that immigrants are held here and not released to other countries.

For years the United States and scores of other countries have decried the inhuman practices of the Chinese Communist Party for holding an estimated million Muslim Uyghurs in internment camps. Is the United States about to do much the same?

The Trump budget provides a gargantuan $31 billion for hiring and training 10,000 additional ICE agents, enough to make it the highest funded federal law enforcement agency compared to the budgets for the FBI and DEA.

Originally, ICE agents were to go after only known immigrant criminals. “We’re starting with the criminals”, Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press”. That quickly became a lie. It is obviously not possible to identify, find, and apprehend 3,000 criminals a day. Even if it were, how could there be so many criminals on the loose?

Instead, to meet Donald Trump’s goal of deporting a million immigrants in his first year, ICE is sweeping up whomever they encounter with brown skin — day laborers who congregate mornings at Home Depot
parking lots hoping to find work, customers at 7-Eleven stores, workers at carwashes and nail salons, dishwashers and gardeners, and most cynically snatching people at courthouses who had come to fulfill their legal obligation to attend immigration proceedings.

These are people who, with random exceptions, have committed no crimes. The Miami Herald got a list of the first 700 to be incarcerated at Alligator Alcatraz and found that 250 of them have no criminal convictions or pending charges at all. Just immigration violation. Moreover, ICE's indiscriminate and indifferent seizure of people off the street guarantees that thousands among the intended millions will be United States citizens.

Americans need to reflect not only on the police state their country has become, but what it could mean for all of us. ICE agents will scour every community to purge the millions Trump wants ejected from his United States.

What if they grab you? Maybe you are white, but your anti-fascist remark or protest sign irks them and they are pressured to meet quota. So when they slam you against a wall and zip-tie your wrists behind your back, your mind races to think of what you are carrying that proves you are a citizen. Probably nothing. We are not required to carry "papers" in this country. So you are loaded into a van and put in a cage somewhere awaiting transfer to one of the nation's 200 immigrant detention facilities. There you will wait for your hearing which, under the new policy that denies bond hearings, you are not going to get.

The policy of disallowing abducted immigrants from seeking a bond hearing will undoubtedly be contested in lower courts and should, on an emergency basis, be elevated to the Supreme Court. That gives rise to forebodings, however, given the justices’ decisions of late.

Take the example of the birthright citizenship case. A district federal court had issued a nationwide injunction against Trump's executive order fulfilling his long-held mania to deny citizenship to anyone born in the United States of undocumented immigrant parents, citizenship accorded by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. But the Court used the case, voting 6-to-3 in the usual partisan divide, to put an end to lower court assumptions that they can issue edicts that control the entire country. Lower court decisions go no further than bringing relief to the plaintiffs in such cases, says the Court.

What was stunning was the Court ignoring the birthright citizenship case itself. Rather than rule then and there that denial of citizenship was clearly in violation of the black letter text of the Constitution, the Court set that aside for another day and in the interim is allowing Trump to do as he pleases, the Constitution be damned. For as long as the Court’s dereliction persists, Trump could be stripping citizenship from an average of 255,000 children per year, according to the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute.

That’s not an isolated case. Ten days ago, the Court handed Trump another victory, reversing a lower court’s ruling and allowing his administration to fire thousands of federal workers. Typical of such emergency applications, the Court neither signed the order nor revealed their vote count. Most significantly, it is only a temporary ruling, but that allows Trump to go forward, firing at will, harming thousands of lives, until the Court gets around to possibly deciding too late that the firing exceeded the president’s power.

Last Monday, the Court repeated the same failure to deal with legality of the president’s action at hand, allowing him to eviscerate the Department of Education, cutting its staffing in half, possibly declaring his action illegal someday too late for the government workers who have been kicked to the curb.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson could have been speaking for all three cases when in her dissent in the birthright case she wrote that the six justices in the majority endangered the rule of law by creating “a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.”

These example set the stage, we fear, that the Court will treat ICE’s denial of bond hearings the same way – allowing hundreds of thousands to disappear into the carceral system only to eventually ruling that the administration had engaged in a colossal abuse of power, long after the imprisonment of people for months and years without any due process or access to legal help, or disappeared out of the country, deprived of any chance to make their case that they belong here.

Trump voters may finally be beginning to realize the immorality of ICE's indiscriminate tactics as they see people they know in their hometowns kidnapped and vanished. These are the people who hand you your
A woman tied to a tree in the process of her arrest..

takeout dinner, who perform the dangerous work of re-shingling the roof of friends down the block, who tend to the elderly living next door, who drives the bus that takes your kids to school. Removal of these industrious people leaves a disruptive void in communities. And it creates a pervasive atmosphere of fear, where parents are afraid to let their kids go to school, and the kids are afraid to go home for fear that their parents may be gone.

A June Gallup poll showed that 79% of surveyed adults see immigration as a good thing for the country and a record-low 17% see it as bad, reversing what polls showed just a few years ago. Support for offering undocumented immigrants pathways to citizenship has risen to 78% from 70% last year, with Republicans registering a 13% gain. Disapproval of how Trump is handling the arrest and deportation of immigrants has reached 62%.

We may see a growing backlash from Americans repelled by the cruelty of Trump’s and Miller’s ugly treatment of people, the vast majority of whom are just trying to find a better life here. The right-wing propaganda channels keep immigration a distant abstraction to keep viewers in line, but as it comes closer and people hear the stories of dreadful mistreatment in our supposed land of the free, compassion for fellow humans may rise along with the realization that this is in total violation of Christian teaching.