Comments
HAMLIN FILE - The Trump administration’s contempt for the rule of law is the hallmark of his second term in office. Total disregard for the law has become so routine, so commonplace, so ubiquitous – and so blatant – that is has become part and parcel of every day’s news.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the operations of ICE, an agency which, from top to bottom, routinely breaks the law and openly dares anyone to challenge their actions. ICE has created a catalog of illegality which, literally, is beyond compare with anything other than the gestapo and a handful of tin-hat tyrants.
The lawlessness which clings to ICE every single day is text-book criminal. ICE routinely attacks – tear gas, physical confrontation – citizens who protest their actions. ICE routinely employs force – tasers, clubs and firearms – against anyone, including women and children, whom ICE has targeted.
Among ICE’s most vicious tactics is the one which turns immigration courts into centers of injustice. There are, across the country, thousands of immigrants who have played by the rules for decades. They file the proper forms, obey the rules and fulfill all the requirements, notably including regularly scheduled appearances before immigration judges. ICE routinely invades the halls of immigration justice in order to detain and deport hundreds of these people.
While it should be hard to imagine anything more disreputable than punishing those who are doing exactly what we ask them to do to become citizens, ICE makes it easy. Use children to capture parents? Stop and detain hundreds of people who aren’t white? Raid neighborhood schools and community centers populated by those whose first language is Spanish? Separate children from their parents and siblings? ICE has been there and done all that.
In Minnesota, a federal judge is considering contempt of court punishment for ICE agents who, under court order, were forced to release those they have illegally detained but repeatedly refused court orders to return their vital documents including driver’s licenses, work permits, green cards, jewelry and cell phones. By any reasonable standards, that’s theft.
While all these flagrant violations of due process of law continue apace, ICE and its enablers are engaged in a Congressional cat fight over restrictions on ICE conduct. That debate an over effort to eliminate the most basic principles of law enforcement from ICE’s playbook.
Across the country, in rural villages, small towns and cities, all law enforcement personnel, sheriffs, police departments, narcotics task forces, fraud investigators – everyone up to and including the FBI – are subject to strict and strictly enforced rules and regulations. To conduct a search, police must provide judges with enough evidence to justify the search. To ensure fair and equitable enforcement of the law, cops are required to wear body cameras and display clear and easily recorded identification. To guarantee that their activities are governed by rules and regulations (notably including use of force), law enforcement agents must undergo rigorous training. ICE leadership and (thus far) a majority of elected representatives insist that placing such restrictions on ICE agents will be too bothersome.
If justice is no more than an obstacle, injustice becomes our rule of law.
(David M. Hamlin is a writer whose essays in CitywatchLA often explore the intersection of civil liberties and current administration. He has, thus far, not been threatened by the FCC or DOJ.)
