The US has recently turned a dark and disturbing corner on immigration. In his zeal to boost deportation numbers, US President Donald Trump is pursuing ever more specious cases, arresting those with valid green cards and visas, and proceeding with deportations despite judges’ orders.
“Due process” might sound humdrum. However, it underpins the freedoms of ordinary people in this country. The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution generally guarantees that no one in the US — citizen or not — should be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
Yet Trump administration “border czar” Tom Homan on Monday last week said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
On Tuesday last week, Trump himself upped the ante, demanding that a judge in one of the cases be impeached.
Both comments reflect an alarming disregard for due process.
That principle is what protects everyone from the knock on the door in the middle of the night and from being thrown into a jail with no recourse. It is a bulwark against the government becoming so powerful that it tramples on individual liberty.
To understand its importance, look no further than Lebanese kidney transplant specialist Rasha Alawieh from Rhode Island who traveled to Lebanon last month. Despite holding a valid H-1B skilled work visa, she was denied entry upon her return to Boston’s Logan International Airport on March 14, arrested and briefly detained.
Her alleged offense? Immigration officials claimed she had “sympathetic photos” of Hezbollah leaders on her mobile phone, including some that had been recently deleted. They also reported that she had told them she attended the public funeral of a Hezbollah leader. Many details remain unconfirmed and new filings in the case have been sealed.
The point is that courts did not get the time to sort through those claims.
On Friday last week, a federal judge ordered that Alawieh should “not be moved outside the District of Massachusetts without providing the Court 48 hours’ notice in advance.” Despite the judge’s order, Alawieh was put on a plane out of the country — one that departed roughly one hour after the judge issued his order. A US Customs and Border Protection official said agents had not seen the order until after the plane took off.
Alawieh’s judicial order did her no good.
That should be a giant flashing red light to Americans for all kinds of reasons. An administration that ignores one type of court order can easily ignore others.
Alawieh’s strange case is not an isolated incident. There is also the case of Columbia University graduate student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who is awaiting deportation proceedings in Louisiana under orders from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, seemingly for his involvement in the protests at the university.
And there is the bizarre situation reported by Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney, who said she was imprisoned by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for 12 days after simply attempting to apply at the US border for a work permit; she said ICE told her she had come to the wrong place.
Then there is the German electrical engineer Fabian Schmidt, a permanent US resident from New Hampshire, who was arrested and, according to his mother, stripped and violently interrogated by immigration officers at Boston’s Logan airport earlier this month. Immigration officials deny the accusation. Schmidt remains in detention. Neither his mother nor his partner have obtained information on why Schmidt, who just recently renewed his green card, is being held. A government statement alludes to “drug-related charges,” which could be a reference to a decade-old misdemeanor charge, his mother said.
A German official told The Guardian that Schmidt was the third German national detained by US border agents and that the situation was being monitored to see if they were isolated incidents or signals of “a change in American immigration policy.”
Trump also recently resurrected the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to short-cut the deportation process for more than 200 Venezuelans whom he called “monsters” belonging to that country’s Tren de Aragua prison gang. A federal judge over the weekend issued a temporary restraining order blocking Trump’s use of the act, which applies only during wartime and was last used during World War II, but by then the Venezuelans had been deported to a maximum security mega-prison in El Salvador.
That is not how matters are handled in a healthy democracy. As with any other arrest, one by ICE officers is supposed to trigger a legal process. Arrestees have the right to a hearing before an immigration judge, where they can make their case and know the charges against them. It is the judge who decides whether the individual should be deported and who then issues the order.
While the administration contends all the Venezuelan deportees were gang members, ICE Acting Field Office Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations Robert Cerna acknowledged in a sworn statement to the court that many of the men did not have criminal records in the US. Families and immigration lawyers have stepped forward to contest the government’s assertions.
Many of those people are not sympathetic figures. In fact, many might deserve deportation. However, the bottom line is that no matter how powerful Trump or ICE is, it is a judge who makes the final call. That is US law and it must be observed.
Patricia Lopez is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. She is a former member of the editorial board at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where she also worked as a senior political editor and reporter.
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