ICE, Jealous Of El Salvador, Declares None May Ever Leave Immigration Gulags
Constitution? We don't do 'Constitution' anymore.
The Trump administration has declared — without ever informing the American people, because what part of authoritarianism didn’t you understand? — that effective immediately, immigrants who came to the US without papers no longer have the right to a bond hearing, no matter how long they’ve been in the US. The new policy was revealed yesterday in reporting by the Washington Post (gift link). Immigration lawyers said the new policy applies to millions of people, including folks who have been here for decades and have established families, own homes and businesses, and who haven’t broken any laws other than crossing the border without authorization (remember, kids, that’s a misdemeanor on the first offense).
The administration is changing how it interprets a 1996 law that allowed “mandatory detention” of certain criminal aliens like murderers and other violent criminals, keeping them in detention until their deportation cases were completed. But in a July 8 memo, Todd Lyons, (acting) director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informed the agency that any immigrants who ever entered the country illegally will now be locked up “for the duration of their removal proceedings.” Because the immigration system is horribly backlogged, that can take months or years.
It’s a huge change in immigration cases, as the American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, because
The default rule, dating back a century, has been that an undocumented immigrant living here is eligible for bond if not a flight risk or a danger.
That rule was changed in ‘96 for people with criminal records. Now the Trump admin is arguing it also eliminated bond for those who entered illegally.
Well, now we know what ICE plans to do with the $45 billion in new funding the Big Ugly Bill gave it to expand its prison capacity. As Lauren-Brooke Eisen, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Mother Jones even before the new ICE policy was announced, the vast expansion of prison funding will “drastically change the landscape. A vast infrastructure of detention will be built, and actually has already started, even before this bill was signed.”
Congratulations, America! We’ll finally have our very own Gulag Archipelago! Just think of the great literature that may eventually be written by some of the survivors!
As the Post explains without actually using the words “thin legal pretext,” Lyons claims this is all perfectly legal if you squint just right at the law, which we have little doubt Trump’s Supreme Court will allow, most likely in another unsigned “shadow docket” decision.
In the past, immigrants residing in the U.S. interior generally have been allowed to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge. But Lyons wrote that the Trump administration’s departments of Homeland Security and Justice had “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities” and determined that such immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody.” […]
The provision is based on a section of immigration law that says unauthorized immigrants “shall be detained” after their arrest, but that has historically applied to those who recently crossed the border and not longtime residents.
And of course, that sets the stage for Trumpers to say See? No different from what Obama did, as long as you completely ignore the fact that 1) Barack Obama limited such detentions to people who had been caught shortly after crossing the border, and 2) even that more limited denial of bond hearings was rightly condemned by civil rights advocates when Obama did it. There were protests and marches, but they aren’t in the headlines now, so libs are a bunch of hypocrites, you see.
If you want the real reason for the change, you need to read about halfway into the Post story, where these two paragraphs are nestled between an ad and a “read more” internal link to another Post piece. According to immigration lawyers, the expansion of mandatory detention will mean a lot more people in IC detention with no chance for a bond hearing,
including immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades. Many have U.S. citizen children, lawyers say, and probably have the legal grounds to defend themselves against deportation.
Forcing them to remain in detention facilities often in far-flung areas such as an alligator-infested swamp in Florida or the Arizona desert would make it more difficult to fight their cases, because they will be unable to work or easily communicate with family members and lawyers to prepare their cases.
As always, the fuckery is the point. Reichlin-Melnick points out that
[What] this is clearly intended to do is to cause people to give up their case and stop fighting — because conditions in detention are so awful and degrading that many people can’t bear them and choose to accept deportation rather than apply for relief they’re eligible for.
The American Immigration Lawyers Association says its member attorneys had already noticed that their clients were being denied bond hearings in multiple states. Greg Chen, the group’s senior director of government relations, told WaPo, “This is their way of putting in place nationwide a method of detaining even more people. […] It’s requiring the detention of far more people without any real review of their individual circumstances.”
On the other hand, fascists say we gotta lock up millions of people to make clear that America is no better than the dictatorships they’re fleeing, and also we have to keep the conditions in immigration concentration camps so miserable that the detainees will stop trying to delay deportation and agree to immediate removal.
Before the $45 billion bonanza for private prison companies that will be running the concentration camps, ICE said in its 2024 annual report that it only detains immigrants “when necessary,” and that all but 37,700 of the 7.6 million people on its docket at the time, other than violent criminals, were released on bond while their immigration cases went forward. Increased supervision was provided for cases in which “noncitizens may be at a higher risk of absconding, have very minor criminal histories but are not considered public safety threats, or have serious medical conditions” (p. 28 of the PDF). That’s what your MAGA types call Joe Biden’s “open borders.”
No more of that, even if almost everyone who bonded out complied with the conditions of their release. There have been a few terrible crimes that have fed Trump’s “all immigrants are dangerous murderers and rapists” narrative, so all immigrants must be treated as dangerous. As with the LA immigration raids, at least some people who committed serious offenses will inevitably be swept up in the mass arrests, so clearly this will be a great way to spend more money than America ever has on prisons.
The Post offers a preview of what the new policy is likely to mean, noting that a number of immigration judges in Tacoma, Washington, have decided on their own to never allow bond hearings for people who crossed the border illegally, regardless of how long ago it was. That’s the basis for a class-action lawsuit from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project. The initial plaintiff, Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez, has been in the USA without papers since 2009, owns a home, and has 10 grandchildren who are US citizens. All eight of his siblings are also citizens, living in California.
Not that it matters; he was arrested by ICE in February, and a federal judge ordered Rodriguez be granted a bond hearing because, among other things, he had “no criminal history in the United States or anywhere else in the world.” But at that hearing, the immigration judge nonetheless denied bond, and Rodriguez has since been deported to Mexico.
Aaron Korthuis, a lawyer in the case, said Rodriguez is typical of the type of immigrants who now face prolonged detention as they fight deportation in immigration courts. He called the government’s new interpretation of bond hearings “flagrantly unlawful.”
Even though Rodriguez was deported, it’s a class action case, so it will keep moving forward, with the possibility of blocking the new policy, maybe, since the Supreme Court left open the option of nationwide injunctions in its recent awful decision barring most lower courts from curbing Trump’s illegal actions. Whether the Supremes decide to respect the exception they made up for their own made-up limits on nationwide injunctions is anyone’s guess, of course.
Because the infusions of detention money are still in the pipeline, we don’t know how quickly ICE will actually ramp up endless detentions. But keep in mind that Florida threw up its tent city internment camp for the Trump administration in just weeks.
It’s also anyone’s guess what may happen to American citizens who “accidentally” get thrown in deportation camps with no chance for a hearing. Maybe we just won’t hear about it for months, or maybe not at all.
[WaPo (gift link) / Mother Jones / Guardian / Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on Bluesky / 2024 ICE Annual Report]
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