US federal court have overwhelmingly ruled (10,000 orders and counting) that migrants are — just like natural-born citizens — entitled to constitutional rights. Among them is the right to due process. This means that detained migrants have a right to a hearing to see whether they can be held in custody until a hearing on the issue. And that issue is whether or not they can be held indefinitely.
The courts have said migrants have rights, far more often than not. The Trump administration has sought to counter this with an extremely novel interpretation of immigration laws that have been on the books for decades, claiming there’s ultimately no difference between someone caught crossing the border illegally (who can be detained and deported without worrying about the Constitution) and someone who has been in this country for months or years and poses no actual flight risk, much less a threat to public safety.
Since it’s not on the right side of the law, the party of “law and order” has encouraged ICE to thwart the law and/or flat-out ignore court orders. ICE has made it a habit to immediately move detainees from detention center to detention center in hopes of preventing their cases from being heard. Not only does it distance migrants from their legal representation, it keeps the venue in permanent flux, which means habeas petitions are doomed to fail because they were filed in place other than where the rights violation took place (the location of the arrest).
ICE also tends to route most detainees to large concentration camps in Texas and Louisiana because they’re ultimately overseen by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court, which has (now) repeatedly decided migrants don’t have rights.
Apparently, the usual ICE bullshit isn’t working well enough or often enough. Now, the administration is straight up mocking the 10,000+ decisions in favor of due process rights by deliberately targeting migrants who have been freed from detention by federal court orders.
Immigrants who have been granted release from detention after winning habeas corpus petitions in court are being re-arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Guardian has identified at least 20 cases nationwide relating to people who were detained after being released on habeas corpus petition in the last year, according to court records, attorneys and media reports.
Twenty cases may seem like an immeasurable drop in the bucket compared to the nearly 100,000 habeas petitions that have been filed since Trump’s assault on migrants began early last year. But it’s also an obvious undercount. This determination relies on what can be gleaned from court records, which means there are likely hundreds of “re-detainees” who haven’t been able to file a motion due to ICE’s deliberate attempts to separate migrants from their rights and representation.
And this effort is amazingly brutal. No normal human being would consider this to be acceptable US government behavior. But this is something the psychopaths and sociopaths running the GOP are willing to do to indulge the whims of their preferred demagogue.
And in Minnesota, seven immigrants were re-detained before even exiting the Whipple federal building detention facility on the outskirts of Minneapolis, as first reported by MPR.
“I don’t think being taken out of a building and directly into the arms of four or more officers complies with the court’s order,” Daniel Suitor, attorney to two of the men, said in a phone interview .
In Louisiana (Fifth Circuit, yo!), immigration officials were held in contempt after re-arresting a single migrant three times after he’d been granted release by federal judges. More of the same is going on in Minnesota (see above) and Pennsylvania.
Not only are migrants being re-arrested immediately after securing their release via court orders, but they are increasingly being deported to countries with which they have no ties. Cruelty on top of cruelty on top of hideous displays of inhumanity. That’s just the day-to-day operations of our current administration, one completely consumed by hatred and capable of little more than inflicting whatever pain it can until it runs out of time… or victims.
