When a Day in Court Is a Trap for Immigrants
Steve Coll writes in the New Yorker on 11/8/17:
“One of the most disturbing aspects of “interior enforcement” of the immigration laws—meaning arrests and detentions carried out far from the American border, typically by ICE agents—is that the actions can pollute the administration of justice and undermine the rights that the Constitution affords all criminal defendants, whether they are U.S. citizens or not. Because immigration-removal proceedings are generally carried out under civil laws, they are exempt from many procedures mandated in criminal cases. For example, the warrants that ICE uses to arrest unauthorized immigrants like Perez aren’t reviewed by a judge; they’re just written up by ICE office supervisors. Immigrant detainees don’t have a constitutional right to a lawyer. Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure don’t always apply when ICE agents investigate a target for arrest, because the cases typically don’t involve a criminal prosecution. This troubling and confusing inheritance of immigration policing has now been made worse by the Trump Administration’s expansion of arrest operations in American courthouses.”
Read more:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/when-a-day-in-court-is-a-trap-for-immigrants